‘‘Advanced live texture baking: A feature that’s most beneficial for use in real-time game engines, OctaneRender 3 supports unbiased GPU texture baking (UV or volumetric) of global illumination, spherical harmonics and 8D light fields in Unreal Engine 4 and Unity plugins.’’
Otoy is good to NOT give much detail and they are slow, I don’t expect that anytime soon but heh…it looks like a solution, unless I understood everything wrong.
Octane is a pretty good renderer and they already teased a UE4 plugin by the past!
Sorry for such a newbie question. Is this somehow different than what you can do with Bake Tools for Blender or Lightup for Sketchup for Sketchup models?
It’s not really any different than Lightmass, it could give better results, but it might take longer to build lighting and would still require lightmap UV’s. The only difference is the code behind how it calculates the lighting, not much else.
I’m pretty sure what they mean by “live” texture baking, is that the texture baking will be progressively rendered. If that is the case, and it probably is, then that is way more awesome than Lightmass. I hope the plugin comes with portal materials, and properly bakes emissive materials which Lightmass does not. Also, GPU accelerated light map baking! I’m excited to see how this turns out. Sorry for the thread necro.
finally more news about octane render 3 plugin for Ue4. Still not sure how exactly it’s gonna work tho.
‘‘We have a new developer who will be taking over the UE4 plug-in shortly, and will be integrating the Octane 3 functionality (i.e. baking) within the integrated plug-in. The idea is you can easily load an ORBX scene from Octane into UE4, with Octane handling light probes, baking and more, either live or offline.’’
It could possibly render higher quality lightmaps (might not have the lighting seams issue that Lightmass has) but it’s probably going to be much slower. Cloud GPU rendering isn’t all that useful because you’ll be very limited by the GPU memory, since the entire scene has to be loaded into memory. Most graphics cards don’t have all that much memory, the most expensive has 12GB, most have 4GB or less.
Doesnt it depend on which type of baking you are doing? I think baking a whole scene at once is not that great anyways, I mean the more im learning how to bake character materials from high quality renderers and other assets, the more it seems you can apply that to whole environments.
For example- bake separate objects at separate times just to get the AO/g.i. lighting/material information from the renderer’ & export to texture the same way alot of game assets are already currently made made. Then you can modularly adjust them and put them all together in the engine with tweaks to make everything flow. Like bake the terrain first then bake your rocks and buildings separate and use the same workflow that are already doing for characters and props, no?
This wouldnt work if you want shadow info for stationary objects without dynamic lighting for example having to have trees & terrain baked together but I’m thinking of this method more for still having realtime shadows but since our current realtime g.i. solutions wont be ideal for a long time this could make that pass for us?
Octane is not a realtime lighting solution, at a very basic level it allows for a quick preview of what lighting will look like, but even with many GPU’s to render you’ll get a moment initially with lots of noise in the render so if you tried to use it in realtime it would be very noisy. Even then, you still have to load everything into graphics memory.
Well I’m not talking about realtime perhaps you must re-read my post or know more about the workflow for rendering to texture. I mean using the speed of the offline render to bake your assets just like you can bake a characters lighting & material information with mental ray into a texture, but with octane and multi gpu’s its way faster- You can bake each asset separately and then in unreal all the g.i. & lighting & everything will just be materials / textures but still look really great as if you used lightmass
You asked about it as a realtime lighting solution:
What you describe as baking textures is what Lightmass already does, in a baked lighting situation it only works with static objects, all meshes have to have lightmap UV’s and during light baking all meshes in the scene have to be loaded into memory since they affect lighting. With GPU’s you can increase rendering speed by adding more GPU’s, but it won’t matter unless your level can fit into the memory of each GPU, plus that type of renderer generally isn’t all that fast to get final results free of noise, it’s just very quick to give a good preview.
It’s more than just replacing the shadow maps, to get a full solution you need to be able to bake directional maps and there’s nothing that does that. The directional maps keep track of where the lighting is coming from so you get specular on baked lighting.