Haoris
March 6, 2021, 12:17am
29
Arkiras:
I confess it is not “fully” dynamic in that interior skylight shadowing is provided by a stationary skylight. Meaning it wouldn’t work for a game with procedurally generated levels, or for something like fortnite where players can destroy most of the map and build their own structures.
The interior “bounce” light is just faked with two unshadowed point lights, their intensity is controlled by blueprint using a float curve and a normalized time of day scalar (seen in the upper left corner) as input. Other than SSGI I don’t know of any non-raytraced realtime GI solution that offers any noticeable indirect shadowing detail so in my opinion unshadowed point lights are basically as good as anything else. Speaking of SSGI, Unreal has it so you can use that too, I turned it off because I felt it washed out the lighting in this particular scene.
Everything else is just the magic of auto-exposure.
Stationary skylights are underrated in my opinion. I get it, no one likes baking lighting, especially for an open world. But if your primary issue is simply shadowing the skylight in a game where the majority of content is artist placed (which I assume AC qualifies, been a long time since I played an AC game), it provides beautiful results.
Yes, obviously baked looks better than realtime when you can afford insane lightmaps building time, heavy lightmaps, memory cost, etc. which is mostly never the case of large open worlds.