I don’t work for Epic, as far as the stuff with Lionhead–LPV is their solution, the only thing that they have that isn’t currently in UE4 is skylight injection(so that not all light comes from the directional light). That’s it, the only thing thing they may add to LPV is cascades, right now you can only define a specific area size that uses LPV, which is bad for interiors because to get better quality you have to make the size smaller since the resolution is fitted to the size, but anything beyond that distance doesn’t get any LPV and interiors often end up black from that, cascades would allow it to use a lower resolution area outside of the main area so that while it wouldn’t be good quality, at least there would be some effect there.
But, even if you shrink the LPV size very small to see the quality it is still very poor quality. It will never be a very good dynamic GI solution. For UE4 the most likely fix is with Distance Field solutions, right now can do shadows and AO, they are looking into how they can use it to do 1 bounce GI and it would give much better results than LPV though still not as good as their original SVOGI solution or Nvidia’s VXGI.
At the moment it looks like VXGI is the best solution, it gives quality results but performance is better than stuff like SVOGI
I have it right in front of me, after geometry pre-cache is completed you can move lights and it’s dynamic GI. That’s pretty much what Enlighten does, what it’s always done… If you change a shader, it has to re-cluster the whole thing and if you move a static mesh it also has to re-compute the whole thing.
The only advantage Enlighten brings to the table is you can move lights about at free will when it’s done it’s geometry pre-cache.
As for LPV, it’s fine for a quick cheap solution… It looks great in CryEngine, we know it’ll never be a real time photon mapping or RT solution…
I was talking about the lamp mesh itself, which since it’s moving can’t use the dynamic GI. The light that’s attached to it can.
That is LPV 
Anyway, for me, Enlighten seems cool but I imagine the licensing probably isn’t attainable for hobbyists or small indie devs, and thus not too interesting. I’m more interested in solutions which don’t involve proprietary plugins and email-to-ask licenses.
Voxel GI is still a terrible memory burden, which makes its utility very limited in practice.
I don’t know how it compares–Epic did demos using SVOGI on a GTX 680, and VXGI should run better than that. Not sure if it’s ok for low-end systems (probably not) but it’s still a better solution.
It’s not just a matter of the rendering time, but the memory. Voxels, even sparsely stored, require a lot of VRAM to store. The more in the scene, the worse it is. I would expect an outdoor scene to be pretty terrible.
So what exactly is the status of this? I see they have it working with UE4 but they make no mention of public availability.
I know that UE4 is modular and not final-featured but real-time lighting and GI should be a given. They even made it a big focus of their early features demo and i didn’t see any inherent problems with it there.
You won’t find an “out of box” price for that system, they only ever do licensing via negotiation. I can promise you, it won’t be cheap. They may eventually offer per seat indie licenses (so long as part of their contract with Unity doesn’t include any kind of competitive restriction), but I don’t see them offering it for less than $200 per seat, per platform. Epic’s model is to avoid integrating any third party software that carries a cost or royalty, in order to ensure they can release things cheaply, and with source (at least as much as they can, PhysX being an exception, but some companies won’t even let you show the code for binding to their libraries without an NDA, hence the console restrictions).
Here’s the email to contact them about licensing: sales@geomerics.com
I’m no financial or marketing expert, but considering that SpeedTree offered their software for $19, I don’t see how geometric can will have success if the licenses are too different from it’s origin.
If Enlighten brings outstanding quality to the lightning in UE4, I personally as individual would be willing to give them 5% royalty and $10 a month for covering the support. Charging same amount per seat for different scale projects seems the Old-Fashioned mode of leading a business.
We’ve all seen that with enough skills you can recreate great lightning in EU4 so… I don’t know how this will workout if it’s too pricey.
However, I’m so happy to see that people are eager to find improvement in the Engine and make it the best tool that people can use it around the world. It really makes me feel nice to be party of the that community and give me the will power to improve myself and my skills.
If they can make more money by offering it easily then they’d probably do it. Speedtree is a different matter, it was integrated with UDK for a long time and they’ve been very good about supporting the engines.
Any news? I’d like to see it integrated in the engine like it is on Unity or for a small fee per user.
Epic games! Please please please please make enlighten available for us! PLEASE PLEASE!!! THIS IS ! No lmaps baking! PLEASE PLEASE
You still have to “bake” with enlighten.
It’s up to Enlighten if they want to make it available, I don’t think it’s likely so if you want to use it you’ll have to talk to the Enlighten people.
I always failed to realize what people’s problem with LPVs is. Fable Legends looks amazing. None of the systems is perfect and given the ease of implementation, LPVs are great.
There’s always a specific case where features will work great, the reason it works well for Fable is that it’s mostly an outdoor environment, where most of the light is direct from the sun, so all you really need is a bit of light in the dark areas even using a skylight object to brighten them a bit and add AO will make it look fantastic, LPV will add a bit of color bleeding which makes it look even nicer.
Try it in other situations and it doesn’t give as good of results, any situation where a large amount of the lighting would be due to GI will look bad. It’s also a bit limited in that it only truly supports directional lights.
Well, truth be told most people here are hobbyists with little production experience, and when a studio like Lionhead tells me it’s good I tend to believe them. I believe people expect some holy grail “IT WORKS WITH EVERYTHING” solution but the truth is, that ain’t happening.