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Lets get in-depth with DFAO/DFGI!!!

Development Discussion Rendering
#1

Hello Everyone,

Its been very long that we got DF AO/GI in UE4 but there is no proper info how exactly it works! There been very long discussion done on Lightmass and other UE4 features. I been trying to get good results with DF AO/GI but it simply dont works!. Artists like rabellogp, koola were using these DF AO/GI pretty good in there work. What exactly these artist doing to achieve such great results!. Apart from put a direct light and sky light in your scene and set it to “movable” there is nothing more info on it!

SO lets dive in depth DF AO / GI to make it understand once and for all!

Please share your experience , tips, tricks and workflow how you using DF AO / GI in your work.

#2

DFAO is easy to get up and running. All you need is to put in a skylight and set it to movable(make sure shadow quality is set to high or epic). In the settings below, you can tweak the properties like max distance and so on. GI is still a work in progress, but involves setting some config file variable and enabling some project setting option (if I recall correctly). The search tool, Google and Youtube are your best friends.

Once you have the basics enabled, it’s all up to you to tweak it. An easy way to tune DFAO is to set the color to red so that you can see the effects more strongly and then switch it back to black or something really close to black(sometimes you need lighter shadows). There are also a lot of console variables that dictate fidelity as well. Because lighting is entirely scene and art direction independent, there are no magic guidelines to follow. Like almost all lighting: it’s around 5% placing/prep and 95% tweaking.

#3

Yes, but how exactly you gonna tweak GI then!

#4

how exactly these are achieved with dg_ao_gi!!

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is it a direct light! or skylight! or some config file! what kind of shader to be needed!

i recently tried df_ao/gi and the engine(4.15.1) keeps crashing!

#5

oh and what about “distance field” is it a part of DF AO/GI !