oh… soo… ? xD
There seems to be a continued bug that I’ve noticed since far shadow cascades were introduced that I wasn’t sure if it was the default engine or the VXGI branch, but while it seems to work perfectly in the normal engine the bug has surfaced again in build.
Basically, if there are far shadow cascades enabled on the directional light, it starts creating a strange clipping where shadows close to the camera sometimes vanish entirely at a hard edge where the closest cascade(s) (depending on how many far shadow cascades there are) would have been loaded in. In short, the amount of far shadow cascades enabled dictates how many standard shadow cascades close to the camera stop functioning.
Also, out of curiosity, would it be possible to make a property for lights with VXGI that changes the light bounce saturation (per light)? Could be helpful with projects that use slightly stylized lighting to bring it closer to the functionality lightmass has.
I think there is something wrong with latest VXGI branch related to ray-traced distance field shadow.
are some images taken from my current project to show the problem.
The image above is the VXGI branch that was released on 28th May. Ray-traced distance field shadow works perfectly, soft shadow it there and you can see it.
The image above is the VXGI branchi that was released yesterday on 4th June. With ray-traced distance field shadow on in point light detail settings, there is no shadow shown in my scene. However if I turn off ray-traced distance field shadow off, the normal shadow effect still works without any problem.
The image above shows that editor crashed during building mesh distance fields. It happens every time when I tried to load Sci-Fi hallway showcase. The branch was successfully built without any error and warning. So I can confirm that the latest VXGI branch is not working properly with shadow features in Unreal Engine 4.
After I encountered shadow problems, I switched to previous version and it still works. It is still good enough for my project on current stage. However, I noticed that VXGI doesn’t work well with distance field shadow as it does with normal shadow or CSM.
are 2 images for comparison.
Image 1:
Image 2:
Image 1 is ray-traced distance field shadow on and image 2 is off. From what I see, when I turn ray-traced distance field shadow on, the diffuse bounce GI in unnoticeable. However, when I increase indirect lighting intensity to 5 times, then bouncing lights become more obvious and my scene looks more real. In image 2, I disabled ray-traced distance field shadow. I didn’t have to change post process settings, VXGI worked as it should. It looks good to me. I am not sure is a bug or VXGI intended to behave like that with distance field shadow.
Hello,
I want use flexible mesh in game and for I want use Flex of Nvidia. I has tried to integrate
/tree/FleX
in the UE4.10 but is not the web page.
I need help.
So, I had a radical thought but I am no programmer. Is it feasible to use VXGI to bake lighting and update it only as needed? In other words, suppose you have a static scene, VXGI bakes it down, VXGI is then disabled and in theory the performance would become the same as Lightmass. If something dynamic happens and changes the scene, then VXGI kicks back on and updates it, perhaps not even in real time, every 5th frame or something along those lines. Perhaps there could be some distance based function there too, so as you move around distant features are getting baked and refined as you move closer.
Thoughts? If it’s a terrible idea or has been asked before feel free to delete . Mainly looking for an option that will give good results in VR while still supporting a near fully dynamic scene.
As far as I know, VXGI doesn’t work that way. It voxelizes entire scene and each voxel contains information of direct lighting and indirect lighting. Basically it doesn’t support any types of baked information if I am not wrong.
There are many solutions to make dynamic lighting environments and the choice is on you. are some personal experience:
Lowering VXGI settings gives you a boost and if it is low enough, it can match the performance of LPVGI and VXGI is much more stable.
You can try using traditional methods like skylight and global illumination in post process volume to brighten your scene if your environment doesn’t have much color variation and you don’t need much depth in your scene.
I have tried the combination of LPVGI and VXAO, it worked and AO pass of VXGI doesn’t give any performance hit. If your scene is not too large, might be a good choice since VXAO provide a solid result and more stable than SSAO. However, if your scene is very large, then you will find LPV gives you flashing of secondary bounce. It is not stable in my scene.
VXGI could be adjusted to support baked lighting. It would not be as good as lightmass but on highest quality it would be good enough for a lot of cases. It would also be much quicker than Lightmass. Indeed after such a bake you could opt in or out for VXGI to remain active for dynamic changes only. Not gonna happen. NVIDIA has already commented they currently have no such plans.
Sorry for the long reply and excuse my UE4/VXGI/GitHub ignorance in advance. I’m an artist and not a programmer but coming from Maya and the Arnold renderer, VXGU looks and sounds amazing.
The amazing thing about UE4 is that it’s opening the door to people like myself to get into game engine development without knowing a single C++ command or convention. The downside is that people like me are way behind the curve and running into lots of problems trying to explore areas like VXGI integration.
TL;DR is there any way the more experienced developers can post an .exe of UE4 with VXGI integrated?
What is stopping from happening? Is there something that makes it prohibitive, like some legal or is it just the time it takes to build it and upload the exe?
It would certainly save me a lot of time and I can could probably contribute to the community in a more meaningful way by actually using VXGI and sharing my experiences (as opposed to complaining why GenerateProjectFiles is looking for VS 2013, or how to clone the right branch etc.). I value all the work you guys are putting into so if there is any way I can contribute in a non-programmer way then let me know.
Thanks for the tips, that’s pretty useful.
That’s what I was thinking. Too bad we can’t convince them to do it to push VR forward now rather than wait hardware to catch up, unless of course the competition does it. Just curious, where did you read NVIDIA’s comment? thread?
Iirc it’s floating around somewhere on the VXGI Q&A ‘forum’ on Github.
It’s not very newbie friendly, that, unfortunately, is a given.
You’ll just have to bite the bullet. Sooner or later there’s going to be an update and there you go again.
- Get a Github account
- Install Visual Studio Express
- Download or clone the latest VXGI build
- Run setup.bat
- Run generateprojectfiles.bat
- Double click UE4.sln
- Wait eons for it to do it’s initial stuff
- Right click on UE4 in the sollutions explorer and select build
- Wait eons again
- Launch UE4 VXGI via F5
I probably forgot some stuff but the above is the gist of it.
Again, yes, it’s not as easy as a lazy plugin or anything, but it’s better than not using it because you can’t follow 10 or so relatively easy -albeit slightly single time consuming- steps.
Just do it 
Hmm, I wonder if it could be partially done from Epic’s side, where it bakes whatever lighting method is active.
I’m secretly hoping Epic will re-open the door on SVOGI (and just copy-paste CryEngines’ implementation for all I care). What can I say, I’m a braindead optimist 
Been getting error a few times when trying to use the 4.12 build, sometimes with general use, and sometimes like in case it won’t even let me turn the effect on.
Hello,
I want use flexible mesh in game and for I want use Flex of Nvidia. I has tried to integrate
/tree/FleX
in the UE4.10 but is not the web page.
I need help.
Hello,
I want use flexible mesh in game and for I want use Flex of Nvidia. I has tried to integrate
/tree/FleX
in the UE4.10 but is not the web page.
I need help.
First you need to connect your GitHub account with your Epic account: log in to your Epic/UnrelEngine account on unrealengine and connect your GitHub account.
then follow these instructions:
Special instructions for FleX branch:
git clone .git
You should now be on the release branch. Run setup.bat. You can now run GenerateProjectFiles.bat, build UE4, run it, etc.
git branch –t FleX origin/FleX
git checkout FleX
GenerateProjectFiles.bat
Open .sln, build UE4.
Run UE4 Editor, open the FleX test project.
I’m not sure if is related to the shadow mentioned by but I don’t seem to be getting any shadows using the 4.12 build.
Maybe I’m missing something obvious. I just have a simple scene with a spotlight, floor plane, a sphere and a cube. VXGI diffuse is enabled. All objects are set to movable. Also, I notice if I untick the “Enable Diffuse Tracing” box there is no noticeable change in the scene.
For the hell of it I built the lighting and get the error “Lighting build failed. Swarm failed to kick off.”.
Should I just go back to the previous build then? I followed the steps in “UE4_VXGI_Overview.pdf” as well and everything thing seems in order.
Hi - with slight trepidation i’m going to add another question to the thread.
Has anyone taken a look at nVidia’s multi projection stuff. Specifically, i’d like to dynamically change the projection in runtime.
Dan
Build Lightmass in Visual Studio, it isn’t done automatically.