Precomputed Realtime Global Illumination

I am coming from a Unity 5 background and I’m wondering if UE4 has something equivalent to Unity’s pre-computed real-time global illumination model? Something that’s built-in and not a separate plugin. I had assumed this was a no-brainer and that UE4 would have something as good or better than this, but I can’t seem to find details on this at all. I am working on a game with outdoor settings where I want day/night cycles.

Enlighten (which is what Unity uses) is available for UE4 but you have to get a sepearate license for it. http://www.geomerics.com/support/

Its not cheap though :)…

Otherwise there are some other options floating around if you search the forums, I can’t remember the names though, things like VXGI, DFGI etc. etc.

This may be of relevance: Dropbox - File Deleted

It’s largely dynamic GI, but there are precomputed elements that feed it.

Short answer, nope.

Long answer, see above.

Wow, I’m shocked. I’ll be using CryEngine 5 instead. I guess Unreal isn’t so Unreal anymore.

Watching static set pieces in vertigo-inducing gimmick-VR is the bee’s knees :wink:

For day/night cycle GI, your best bet is a fully dynamic GI system like AHR, VXGI, or LPVs (LPVs are built in to the engine by default, the other two are plugins). Outside of that though, there’s no solution for precomputed realtime GI unless you buy an Enlighten license.

Depending on how desperate you are, you could manually place point lights and run a blueprint to change their color over the time of day cycle, but that requires a lot of manual work to get going.

I’m not 100% sure but I think it’s the method that was used in metal gear solid 5 for it’s dynamic time of the day.

Enlighten is OK, but it’s very limited in what you can do with it–only dynamic lights, no dynamic objects and all of the objects have to exist during precomputing to be able to use it. Besides that, it still has many of the issues that baked lighting has (and it takes a lot more time to build the lighting). That’s probably why Enlighten is the only solution like that, because people want something better, like VXGI