[Dynamic GI in UE4] Unity 5 Free with Enlighten

[DaveFace]

@TheJamsh;236190

Anything built directly into and shipped with the Engine has to be open-source now.

Just to point out, Unreal is not open-source, as Epic charge a royalty fee for commercial use of the engine. Semantics, I know.

@gboxentertainment;236812

I’ve tried the Enlighten solution in unity - was not impressed at all. Its a half-baked solution. The only difference between it and a fully baked solution is that you can move a light around and get the gi effect. If you change a material color, it has to be re-baked again.

VXGI on the other hand is fully dynamic and is efficient because it uses view-dependent cascaded 3D textures, where color is directly written and directly read from these textures. Multiple bounces (effectively unlimited) can be incorporated easily by an extra cone tracing pass within the voxelization shader. Sure you need a top graphics card to run it - but it can also be scaled very well by lowering voxel resolution, reducing number of cones - the quality loss is not significantly noticeable for diffuse (i have been able to run my own implementation of voxel cone tracing gi on a gtx485m laptop).

Unfortuantely I think a lot of people are confusing Enlighten for a fully dynamic solution, because that’s how they advertise it - but there is baking involved. It’s not like DFAO / DFGI which run in realtime (minus the computation of the distance fields).

VXGI looks like a great solution in theory, but since it’s going to be artificially limited to high-end Nvidia cards I don’t see it being of any use for games. You’re having to manage an entire lighting solution / pipeline which can’t run on either console and well over half of PC users.