Global Illumination alternatives

[anonymous_user_2a254ae9]

Would the trick that mentioned regarding shapes attached to characters work out of the box or is that something you will have to add specific support for?

It’s great that even without DF characters can receive GI, I think mostly that would even be enough for some time and if the shapes trick would work, that would be really cool.

Great to be watching the progress with reatlime GI while having in mind that just a few years ago software/offline renderers were dealing with similar problems, really amazing it’s now something we deal with in realtime applications

[The_Distiller]

I built a little DFGI testscene. It’s such a promising approach, keep up the fantastic work !

Time of day GIF

[Frenetic_Pony]

@DanielW;215046

Instanced meshes are fully supported by all distance field lighting methods (AO, GI, shadows) in latest. For foliage you have to go into the instance settings and enable bAffectDistanceFieldLighting. It’s off by default because stuff like grass and bushes with high instance counts can really destroy performance.

Well that’s what you’ve got bent normals from SSAO/Ambient occlusion raytraced primitives for right? Or… Crytek changed it to a spherical harmonic occlusion term with even better results, but the same idea.

@DanielW;215046

I am working on landscape GI at this very moment =) My goal is to combine surfel GI with heightfield GI to get a dynamic GI solution for outdoors. It has to be a separate implementation because surfels don’t scale up to huge surface area that well, and terrains need to be represented by heightfields instead of distance fields, so a different ray tracing kernel is needed.

Stick with a dynamic cubemap of the sky with multiple taps/importance sampling for that? Usually the sky isn’t terribly costly to re-rendering twice.

@DanielW;215046

Compared to LPV here’s how I see Distance Field GI:

• Vastly higher quality indirect shadowing - leaking is actually solvable
• More detail in color bleeding - material is evaluated per surfel (disk) isntead of for a huge voxel
• Much higher view distance, not limited by volume texture scaling

• Only single bounce for now (can be improved)
• Have to be able to represent your scene with distance fields / heightfields

Well it’s better than representing the scene with a volume texture that can’t even have an empty/null representation.

@DanielW;215046

Yeah I haven’t done anything for indirect specular yet, and metal is fully specular. I will keep thinking about this. The problem is that one of the expensive steps (irradiance cache interpolation) is already heavy with just interpolating float3 Irradiance, if I try to store directionality which is needed for specular it will get a lot slower. Will probably have to bite the bullet on that anyway.

Here’s the paper I mentioned earlier: http://www.jp.square-enix.com/info/library/pdf/Virtual%20Spherical%20Gaussian%20Lights%20for%20Real-Time%20Glossy%20Indirect%20Illumination.pdf Better VPL representation for specular results.

[ZacD]

I’m at a loss here, I can get distance field GI to work in a launched .exe from UE4 4.7 preview 5 by editing the ConsoleVariables.ini file, but no matter what .ini files I try editing, I cannot get distance field GI to work in the editor, help?

[darthviper107]

I don’t think it’s in Preview 5, you have to do a build from the current source

[iniside]

@ZacD;216543

I’m at a loss here, I can get distance field GI to work in a launched .exe from UE4 4.7 preview 5 by editing the ConsoleVariables.ini file, but no matter what .ini files I try editing, I cannot get distance field GI to work in the editor, help?

You will need to build from master branch.

[ryanjon2040]

@Bladerskb;215888

Would be if someone posted a before/after of a fully fledged demo scene like the suntemple demo inside talked about.

I’m downloading master branch now. When everything is done i’ll post a SunTemple demo video comparing DFGI and LPV.

[ryanjon2040]

Some quick screenshots:

[Bladerskb]

omgosh pics in these threads are amazing.
danielw, you have outdone yourself this time.

[anonymous_user_f2b8b290]

I’m kindof amazed it works at all in these levels that I haven’t tested since it’s so early and the implementation is so complex =)

Somebody post a time lapse with the sun direction changing if you will, that’s where dynamic GI really shines.

Mobile temple quality clearly needs some work.

[The_Distiller]

@DanielW;216875

Somebody post a time lapse with the sun direction changing if you will, that’s where dynamic GI really shines.

Actually I did

[ZacD]

You will need to build from master branch.

Oh okay, weird that it works with the stand alone .exe without the builds.

[SonKim]

@The_Distiller;216428

I built a little DFGI testscene. It’s such a promising approach, keep up the fantastic work !

Time of day GIF

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img540/4397/k5IgSx.gif

I can’t stop looking at that gif, it’s amazing - it reminds me of the first time I saw SVOGI in action. Imagine what 2 bounce of indirect light would look like Keep up the work !

[Sotalo]

This + Skylight = Solution?

[anonymous_user_d9a79241]

Hi The_Distiller,

Can you explain how did you do the timeday? How you can update the sky material? Some steps about the DFGI description much appreciated.

I also compiled the master branch and used indirect lighting and the results are very good!

[The_Distiller]

There is no sky material there, I simply used atmospheric fog and a directional light. That’s it

[anonymous_user_ef649ae3]

i’m at a loss on how to get any results. I’ve built mine from master branch on and I’ve enabled both variables in the consoleVariables.ini files?
am I missing something else? are there other ini files? did I put it in the wrong one?
i’ve put a directional light/point light, atmospheric fog, turned on force precompute lighting, can’t think of anything else to get this thing going?

please help

[Nick]

Holy bananas, that looks fantastic

I was wondering if you’ve tested out this GI solution with an indoor scene and dynamic man-made lighting (switchable lights, flashlights, etc.)?

@The_Distiller;216892

Actually I did

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img903/3307/yxrLxZ.gif

[Jambax]

Is it me, or do Shadows look insanely dark even at midday? Mind you I don’t think this is necessarily anything to do with the DFGI implementation, more just games in general. I mean, if you go outside in that environment IRL, you’d probably see hardly any shadow at all, or if you did it’d be considerably more lit up and faded than that.

This whole thread is crazy though… man. Epic have some of the smartest rendering people. Turnaround time on this has been insane.

[Kenomica]

Wow, I am excited for this! Great work so far.