Few months ago I saw LPV and VXGI , but I was told LPV is outdated and VXGI is too expensive to run decently on anything less than GT980Ti and similar.
I also heard UE4 was going to integrate LPV improvements from LionHead studios (Fable legends makers). what happened to that?
Apart from that I read about AHR by community but I don’t know much about that either.
So the end question is does UE4 has a dynamic GI solution?
I would also like to know how other games and tech use GI for example what is Geomerics Enlighten based on? Is it a LPV like technique?
On the other hand Metal Gear solid V the phantom pain handles GI decently , what technique do they use? It looks like LPV .
Enlighten is UE4 solution too. They offer integration and FF7 RE has it. Also you could add to the list hacky GI from Ark
Anyway, I don’t think we will see GI soon. Basically Epic don’t want to use half-working solution like “Good only for outdoor environment” or “Good only for interior”. They tried to implement 2 different systems(One per out/interior case), but then optimization pass happened and everything is abandoned now.
If you look at every GI solution - it always has some serious limitations - GI in cryengine is outdoor environment oriented, VXGI is too heavy, DFGI is waay too heavy, HFGI is only for landscape, Enlighten requires baking and not truly dynamic.
Soo I just hopes it happened as soon as possible
In ARK they use 2 differences sources for GI calculation: dynamic sky and “unlocked” sphere reflection captures. Then they interpolate lighting data between this 2 sources based on which light have more influence over area at the moment. For example in the field you get pure sky and during night in the forest you get light from capture. I could be wrong in some details, but it is what I remember from their stream. I’m pretty sure it may be a little more complex than I described
Fox engine - no idea. I watched their video presentations and slides, but have not found any information on GI implementation I can only speculate, so my guess is their GI is bound to open environment. There is literally 2 solid interior levels in whole game + a couple small rooms
Enlighten wouldn’t be so bad if not for some ridiculously long baking times.
In all most environments are static anyway, with dynamic lighting. And for that case Enlighten fits quite nicely.
I remain convinced that nothing comes close to VXGI (or similar) at this stage. So we’re looking at PC games released around 2020 and the next-next-gen consoles having full dynamic GI. It’s close but a few years away.
For static lightmapping with dynamic lights there’s a bit more optimisation to do for VR, etc. so that will probably be the main focus the next five years.
LPV doesn’t appear useable for a large majority of developers.
Thats actually not really true, Cryengines new SVOTI system looks also really good in interior scenes…
Does anyone know what the status of enlighten is ? FF7 is using it but what are the costs ? is there even a posibility for indies to get they’re hadns on ?
I’m not sure if/how much DICE has changed enlighten for star wars battlefront 3 but it looks absolutly amazing in EA’s frostbite engine…
I inquired with them some time ago and yes, they are completely out of reach for indies. They gave me a “starting at $125k” so yeah. Meanwhile it’s free in Unity. Not sure what they’re thinking.
The performnace is actually very good for a complete dynamic GI solution, they use it already in Kingdom Come which will be released on PC but also on Xbox one and PS4.
Of course it has some little issues but it looks absolutly fantastic, and don’t forget they just started to develope SVOTI, so there is a lot of potential.
What? No way… the price is absolutly nuts…
It’s a pity cause it is by far the only good GI solution for UE4 even if it’s not fully dynamic.
They should really team up with Epic…
As an artist, I wouldn’t use it for environments for my portfolio, at least clean environments, here’s the main problem areas I saw http://i.imgur.com/jg6HIsr.jpg
There’s still more bleeding, blotchiness, and too soft areas I didn’t highlight in those screenshots. VXGI has the same issues though, but I think it looks a bit better, but again it’s slower.
The bleeding problem was resloved “mostly” and like i wrote it is still a work in progress, they call SVOTI even experimental.
And for the bleeding, we even have this kind of problems with lightmass, so i don’t see any logic in not using SVOTI.
I would love to see this kind of lighting / GI in UE4. Take a look at kingdom come on youtube “the new alpha”, SVOTI is looking absolut amazing.
I understand that some people didn’t like Crytek/Cryngine becasue of some reasons but SVOTI is by far the best full dynamic GI solution so far.
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As an artist, I wouldn’t use it for environments for my portfolio, at least clean environments, here’s the main problem areas I saw http://i.imgur.com/jg6HIsr.jpg
There’s still more bleeding, blotchiness, and too soft areas I didn’t highlight in those screenshots. VXGI has the same issues though, but I think it looks a bit better, but again it’s slower.
Well we are talking about games, not portfolios (;.
And this is perfectly acceptable for game, especially if it takes only few miliseconds to render and scale well with open environments.
Performance has improved considerably in later VXGI builds. There are also a few settings you can change to seriously bump up the performance with minimal decrease in lighting quality. I can get ~30 fps out of my GTX 670 on the SciFi hallway scene.
VXGI looks definitly also very nice but as far i know it is not usuable on consoles yet… I’m sure they will improve the performnace constantly but VXGI is right not really usuable for any real game projects.
Hopefully this will change next year…
I would love to test VXGI but i have absolutly no idea how to compile all this things, would be really nice to have Gameworks or VXGI as a plugin.
Definitly No, the best you can get right now is LPV which is actually not production ready.
Even ARK is using some kind of self developed GI solution… Which has not really a good quality…
Ryan’s AHR seems to be very interesting but i can’t tell you how the performnace impact is or if AHR is even production ready.
I can only speculate, so my guess is their GI is bound to open environment. There is literally 2 solid interior levels in whole game + a couple small rooms
