I’ve seen plenty in the way of indoor stuff for UE4, we have made a caves scene and to my eye at least it looks good. What I haven’t seen much of is more realistic outdoor scenes and personally will admit with UE4 I’m struggling a bit to get lighting and atmosphere looking correct, everything looks err Unreal I guess is the correct analogy. It’s a little jarring going from something that looks great with intricate lighting to an outdoor portion quite contradictory… It would be interesting if anyone has come close to the Quixel demo shown below, as we never struggled with CryEngine or Unity for that matter (Which the Quixel demo is made in) in regards to outdoorsy stuff:
I noticed making everything as dark as possible with a lot of point lights gives a scene the right “Look”, but it’s a little harder to get away with that when you have a TOD system.
It’s most likely a learning exercise on my part, but any input appreciated.
I worked with the cryengine for around 15 months… For now there is no way to get a similar result with UE4 “for outdoor scenes” , no matter what people here maybe say but the full dynamic global illumination in the cryengine is really good and you will never get such a good result with the precalcuated light maps… for this scenes…
It’s really a pity that UE4 has no 100% working full dynamic global illumination integrated… but hopefully someday they will come a update…
Don’t know where you’d get the idea that dynamic GI would be better than pre-rendered GI, it’s going to be a long time before any real-time GI solution is as good as prerendered.
For outdoor scenes Cryengine has a good TOD system, UE4 has a better default setting than UDK did though.
Static lighting is fine unless dealing with dynamic objects, generally static / pre-computed lighting is better. That being said, there has to be a reason why outdoor scenes look as they do and it’s generally down to lighting or shaders / textures… These assets were used in CryEngine, so I know visually what they look like… It’s trying to match the two up… With no luck for the moment.
I’d put it down to lack of experience, but mass effect / Epic demonstrations and anything I’ve seen of outdoor scenes look similar. Not to say there isn’t a solution…
A TOD will affect shadows and light position, but it doesn’t really contribute to much else.
The TOD is going to change how the sky looks and how the illumination from the sky works (not the sun, the sky). There’s also probably a difference in how the light bounces. From that video with dynamic lighting there’s bounce effects that shouldn’t be there, and effects that are low resolution. If you’re trying to get something realistic it won’t look like that.
Anyways, good environments are possible with UE4:
Lightmass is going to determine the illumination, you also select the enviro color. A skybox will set atmosphere but it’s nothing to do with lighting, you can keep it separate… Let’s say I have a directional with a high intensity and change the sun height lower, the sun height won’t affect the brightness of lit objects (Assets)… That’s the way you want it to be.
The example is ok, I’ll keep playing around and try out LPV and see how things go. It is relatively simple to get a good looking outdoor scene in CE, it’s trying to figure out exactly why. It’s more a case of getting something looking good or even semi-realistic, easily achieved in dark scenes with point lights… But you need to have a bit of contrast.
The Sky is adding some blue illumination to the scene, in Cryengine the TOD system will change the sky and the sun based on the angle/height of the sun
It’s about how the sky changes color based on the position of the sun/time of day. You could do some stuff in blueprints if you want, to get something realistic you’d want to figure out how atmospheric scattering would work.
It is and it does in CryEngine not sure exactly how UE4 works yet only been using it over a month, well I’ll keep diving and see what I can do…
Everything I’ve seen of UE4 so far, looks like it’s having the issues I’m having. Not necessarily a bad thing, it’s finding out the best ways to extract the most out of lighting scenarios.
All i can say is i agree that prerendered light is better for indoor scenes but definitly not for outdoor scenes. At the end that doesn’t mean that you can’t get good results with prerendered light in outdoor scenes.
There is reason why almost all AAA games use full dynamic GI, cause you get more realistic results even with less work on the scene.
No, that’s not true at all. Very few games use any type of dynamic GI and none of them are all that great, the system that was being developed for UE4 was getting there but required too much processing power. The games that try to put a system in don’t have any choice-they might have day/night system so they couldn’t use precomputed lighting if they wanted, or it would require too much memory for precomputed lighting. But precomputed lighting is still going to be more realistic for a very long time.
It seems that there are many opinions, i can just repeat myself, i’m strong beliver in Full Dynamic GI “for outdoor games” it just looks much more realistic. As i said there is a reason for Dynamic GI… Frostbite 3, Snowdrop engine, Cryengine etc… they all are using ful dynamic GI for they’re games, even Lionhead developed a “own” Dynamic GI solution" to use UE4 with they’re new game… So when someone is planing to develope a game like the divison, dayZ or what ever, full dynamic GI is a must go for me.
My statement is no offense against UE4, i mean i switched from cryengine to UE4, willing to learn a complete new engine, cause i simply see the beneftits that come with it… but i still hope, the day will come when UE4 becomes full dynamic GI support.
