New Cinematic Lighting & Rendering Features Used in the Paragon Trailers & Game Jam Results

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WHAT
Lead Lighting Tech. Director Jerome Platteax and Sr. Programmer, Graphics Wright join Alexander to talk through and demonstrate the new lighting tech used in creating the Paragon trailers and on their way to you all in the upcoming 4.11 release.

Also, the December #ue4jam results are in! Tune in to hear the announce of the winners and watch us play the games live.

WHEN
Thursday, Dec. 17 @ 2:00PM ET - Countdown]

WHERE
www.twitch.tv/unrealengine

WHO
Alexander Paschall - Community Manager - @UnrealAlexander](http://twitter.com/UnrealAlexander)
Jerome Platteaux - Lead Lighting Tech. Director - @Feaneroh](https://twitter.com/Feaneroh)
Wright - Sr. Programmer, Graphics - @EpicShaders](http://twitter.com/EpicShaders)

Questions for the team? Let’s hear em!

Archive here:

Aleexander is listed first :smiley: so we get the JAM sults first? Im very tight up on this :slight_smile:

Question if I wanted to ¨dive in the code¨for the graphics and lighting part, where should I start and what would be the important parts and look at this?

I have a couple of questions:

  • Will Paragon bring volumetric lighting? If not, is it planned?

  • Are planar light types coming?

  • What kind of improvements are planned for the post effects, new lens flare types, reduced circle DoF noise?

  • Are the explosions all 2d card based or truly volumetric?

  • Is clothing being simulated via NVIDIA’s APEX or a proprietary solution?

  • Dynamic Emissive lighting - yay or nay ? (which can be emmited from any arbitrary shaped object, and still have correct look).

  • Will we get option to bake only static ambient occlusion to light maps ? There is node in material editor which lets us extract baked ambient occlusion, which can be useful for texturing, but otherwise one would want to have fully dynamic lighting and just use baked AO for materials.

Sweet can’t wait to see it

New lighting tech… Please let it be a good real-time lighting solution, or an improvement of those that already exist and have not been developed due to refocus on performance.

Have thethree next steps in lightmapping outlined last year made it into the engine? Mismatch in neighboring texels has remained a problem.

Have there been any improvements to SSR, either to reduce the worst artifacts (missing reflections at the sides of the screen/around characters) or to add new features, like the contact hardening and elongation which was shown by Dice at Siggraph this year?

Is there any good method to exclude bright light sources from sky reflection capture, to avoid the double-sun problem?
Have reflection capture actors been fixed to return accurate luminance values without fiddling with Brightness?
Do box reflection captures still return invalid results when there is nothing in/near the capture component, or can they now fall back to other capture methods(~slide 73)?

Have you looked at spherical gaussians as a possible improvement for materials which are somewhat rough? Is this (or something similar) likely to make it into the engine?

Has internal research into dynamic GI been completely abandoned? Is that something which is likely to see a return in the future?

I’d also like to second questions about support for other kinds of area lights. Not having access to planar lights is a showstopper for certain kinds of arch-vis work.

It would be nice to see Hybrid Ray Traced Shadows. :slight_smile:

When is 4.11 Preview :slight_smile:

Is there a plan or an ETA for integration of NVIDIA VXGI?
It’s very amazing tech and working great in NVIDIA’s branches on Github for 4.9 and 4.10.

This would be more useful in future as everyone do not use Nvidia HW.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?44278-Realtime-Dynamic-GI-Reflections-AO-Emissive-plugin-AHR

only 3 hours to go omg omg omg :slight_smile: :smiley: :wink: paragon stream jeeehaa

I share the same excitement. Looking for 4.11 spoilers! =)

This podcast should have started by now - technical problems?!

check the countdown mate :slight_smile:

[Question] Does paragon take advantage of any form of Global Illumination tech? If so will it find its way into the main branch of UE4?

Thanks for the great answers!

You rendering guys are always super forthright with this stuff and that’s awesome.

Reprojecting content significantly outside the bounding shape creates visual errors-- here’s the sky, for example:


I think it would be better if box reflections could return ‘clear’ results, and fall back to a probe with less (or at least, different) parallax error when there’s nothing inside the capture/transition.

Hey thanks for answering my question.
While proposed solution would be good, it does not solve all problems.
For example, moveable objects won’t have baked static lighting, which while is intendent for lighting, would be problematic when using AO for texturing.

Or I would like to have dynamic skylight lighting (because of moving objects) and dynamic directional light with dynamic indirect lighting (either LPV or VXGI), still require indirect lighting intensity to be above 0.

It would be nice to have ability, to bake ambient occlusion, for fully dynamic lighting, but to actually never show it on meshes, and just use it for texturing. It would just ignore all light sources expect skylight, and would never render in game.

Finally, real-time indirect/soft shadows. It only took about a decade to see them implemented in a mainstream engine.

Question: Are capsule shadows DX11-only?