Voxel Probe Lights
Introducing a new GI system which does not require UV layouts for models. So, there’s no need to create UV channels for this purpose anymore. Moreover, creating high-quality UV layouts for the most of the content used in architectural visualization (high-poly models) is a very difficult task.
This solution worked good for our Oil-Refinery demo having a high density of high-poly 3d models, as making UV layout for the whole scene would be next to impossible.
=========================
can we see lightmass without 2nd uv lightmap ] infuture in Unreal engine ?
is its possible or there is solution ??
making lightmaps is the Worst thing in UE4 and its Hard For Complex Objects
Lightmass can’t work without UV’s since the lighting is saved to image maps. What’s shown in your first post there is a completely different type of lighting system that converts the scene to voxels (cubes) and then calculates a lighting color for each cube which then gets applied in that general area for the mesh. There’s a bunch of issues though with that type of lighting system, UE4 originally had a system like that when it was first shown off in Beta, but it was too slow for most machines
That system does not bake lighting, it approximates lighting every frame to voxels and it’s slow and causes some issues (like bleeding because the voxels aren’t going to line up exactly with your mesh).
The probes method is something many games use but it’s got even more issues than voxels and isn’t as realistic.
i think the quality of top screenshot first post ] is really good
if we achieve this quality in ue4 without lightmaps is enough for me
in this way we can import objects directly form 3ds max or revit or other 3d softwares
@Farshid Unigine GI solution is based on probes as darthviper107 said but it’s static. You can have different lighting scenarios, but GI won’t change dynamically with moving lights. That’s why they can achieve higher quality than the voxel based GI used in UE4 (Nvidia’s VXGI now and SVOGI in the past).
The light still needs to be baked into those probes (You’ll need to wait for the system to build light anyway) but you don’t need the unwrapped UV’s cause the light is baked into the probes (which are densely scattered all over the scene). It’s similar to what Unreal is doing with volumetric lightmaps for dynamic objects (into the lightmass importance volumes).
Unigine has also a pretty good dynamic AO solution that helps a lot to achieve the quality you’re seeing in those picures. The indirect shadows that can’t be accomplished by their voxel based GI solution is well handled by their AO system. (btw UE4 dynamic AO is one of its weak points for archviz imo).
The idea is simple enough it could be applied to lightmass, I guess. You’d need sparse volume texture octrees that are dense on static geometry surfaces and mostly empty everywhere else, like a super-charged take on UE4’s volumetric lightmaps.
Their own documentation says this is static lighting that can take up to days to bake on complex scenes at high quality. It does affect dynamic objects and you can have dynamic lights on the scene as well, but the GI itself is static.
Very interesting. But I wonder if this tech can run smoothly on consoles or moderate PC specs. One of the awesome things about UE4 is that it can be used fairly across different machine specs. Wouldn’t this require a high end pc for it to work properly?