Progressive Light Baking

Development Rendering
1

Hi erveryone,

i just have seen the upcoming feature of the Unity engine and even i am not a big fan of Unity the idea of Progessive Light Baking is great.

What do you think about this method ?

@anonymous_user_9c39f750 Developers: is there any chance to implement such an progessive methot in Lightmass ?

Cheers
Hangs

2

The same guys (otoy) are doing it for unreal too. It’s gonna be a plugin. no ETA tho. Source : I asked them on twitter directly.

3

I Thought they are doing a Render to render single frame and not the whole lightmap data ?

By the way, what means ETA ?

4

ETA= Estimated Time of Arrival

What Unity is doing is adding the feature for progressive lightmap rendering from the current camera view, or you can use it to render still images at a higher quality than what you normally get in the game (mainly for lighting and reflections).

5

Just gonna leave this here :
Unless i’m mistaken it’s not going to be restricted to camera view and will work for games too.

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and

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6

Ah okay thats interesting.

Anyways, whats the future plans for lightbaking in Unreal ?

7

Unreal 4 future plans seems to be real time lightening like CryEngine, while you can keep using lightmass baking if you wish.

8

But… I don’t see any development on that side. Do you? They had something called DFGI but it got abandoned afaik. Now we have nothing outside of vxgi but this is not made by Epic.

9

VXGI is closed source too and performs well only on Nvidia hardware, poorly on AMD cards. I hope EPIC will invent best GI solution that has great performance on all GPU-s

10

I think at the moment its not very realistic to expect a fully dynamic GI solution which works very good and fast in the next few years. I think the combination of Baked and Dynamic lighting is quite a clever method, but the tools and to work with this system in Unreal is quite unhandy. Thats why i think that some more next Gen ( :smiley: ) tools should be implemented to make it easier and more fun to work with baked lighting in Unreal.

11

I agree with you PrHangs.

  • ditch the baking process is not realistic if you target multiplatform like pc / android / ios / html5
  • photon mapping is old school and produce artefact
  • brute force path tracing GPU tool with more accurate indirect diffuse would be great
  • better interactivity in the process with an IPR view of the result you will get

Basically this sound exactly like what otoy is trying to do …