, both VXGI and DFGI current states and demands frighten me for the time being. It seems we won’t see a decent dynamic GI solution with full features in UE4 any time soon. I really miss SVOGI. 
You are looking at the prototype that was in 4.7. DFGI (4.8) does NOT sample SceneColor. Surfels (oriented disks) are placed all over meshes capturing their position and diffuse color. Those are then lit with shadowing to compute how much light they should bounce. Then the scene is lit with the surfels as if they are point lights - Virtual Point Lights. Distance field occlusion is used to shadow these VPLs.
Even with 4.8, I don’t have emissive hooked up yet. It should work well for a single object like that, but not for small bright emissive spots due to the surfel disks being fairly sparse.
@PLASTICA-MAN: Given how early it is for both VXGI and DFGI, I see it the opposite way. I’m actually excited about their potential! SVOGI comes with it’s own set of limitations (especially for large environments) and wasn’t scrapped for no reason.
The current VXGI implementation should be theoretically more efficient and to the same quality than SVOGI, simply because it uses cascaded 3D textures which are sampled directly by the cone tracing. The sampling of octrees was quite intensive by comparison. The reason why SVOGI was able to run on a gtx680 was because a lot of its meshes had to be static, whereas VXGI can be fully dynamic. The use of direct 3D textures instead of octrees is the only difference between the two techniques and everything that was done in SVOGI can be done in VXGI.
I think the complaint is that VXGI won’t run on anything but Nvidia cards, whereas SVOGI was brand agnostic.
The version that Nvidia integrated is agnostic, DX11 is required, not Nvidia hardware.
where did it say this?
Not true, all it needs is DX11
Depending on the scene, the current VXGI state can actually do a pretty good job. Take a look at some tests I’ve done: NVIDIA GameWorks Integration - Asset Creation - Epic Developer Community Forums
The main problem with VXGI right now is the lack of multiple bounces, because it makes real-time reflections impossible for indirect lighting.
Great work you did there buddy. I know about the problem you mentioned and I told Mike about it. Not only that, but you need to enable SSR to get some reflections while SSR is not good to project indirect reflections resulting from indrect lighting caused by one bounce or even two from source lights that may be away from your screen space.
Geomerics for UE4 looks very good: Geomerics Enlighten Finally supports UE4 - General Discussion - Unreal Engine Forums
Unity 5 has it integrated by default and now Unity 5 is free. I really hope Epic adds it to UE4 too !
Dear ,
Thank you for UE4 Rendering!
I am amazed to see the changes occurring with each new version!
Yeah but the problem still remains, Unlike unity, Unreal Engine 4 provides full access to its source code that’s why in unity it’s integrated by default but they can’t (don’t want to) do that in UE4 unless they want to give their code away.
I am just a small part of the Epic rendering team =)
The Gameworks VXGI thats been integrated with UE4 doesn’t give their code away.
Yep my friend! That is why I really don’t know why Enlighten be integrated for UE4. We will have the biggest choice in choosing the GI solution we want
Gameworks is not integrated in UE4, they have a seperate branch for this.
I have been experimenting with the new GI recently and have been quite impressed with the results that I have been getting, especially considering that I’ve only been using freely available assets and that setting up good lighting is not my area.
However today, I did something that has basically killed nearly all the GI lighting in my maps. I’m not sure what caused this, but I think it was because I moved two map assets from one folder to another. There is nothing else that I did that I can think of that caused this, as I’m getting similar results in all three of the maps in the project now. In two of the maps I still get some GI lighting, as shown by using the toggle under the lighting feature menu. But a lot less and darker than it was before. In the other scene, only one object still shows any GI effect.
I’ve tried a number of things to “reset” the lighting, including deleting the lights and re-adding them, with the same settings as before. Commenting out the “r.DistanceFieldGI=1” then restarting the editor, and then closing it again, and then turning GI back on and starting the editor again. Disabling the generate mesh distance field settings, and then re-enabling it again (including the required restarts). But nothing seems to get the lighting back to how it was. So does anyone have any ideas if moving the maps could have caused this, and how to fix it?
Before:
After:
It’s seems the difference is you added a Skylight actor in your second scene?
I’ve tested the new lighting system in Unity 5 and it’s not very good, the worst thing is that it takes much much longer to build lighting than it did for the old static system. And once it’s done it only works for static objects that already exist in the scene.
VXGI is probably the ultimate solution, once more PC’s can handle it.