Again, those examples don’t have any other choice, seriously read what I post.
Maps in Battlefield are too big for lightmaps, the install would be massive. They also have destructable parts which can’t use precomputed lighting.
DayZ/ARMA3 have a dynamic time of day, the light is moving which means they can’t use precomputed lighting.
And there are no articles about how much more realistic dynamic GI is to precomputed. It’s always a case of looking at what you’re doing with your game, if you want a dynamic TOD then precomputed lighting is out, so then you have to think about how to get nicer lighting, so various studios will create some system to fake GI. None of them do it that well because it takes too much processing power. Doing precomputed lighting in UE4 is just like rendering GI in something like Vray or Mental Ray, and it’s very realistic.
Here’s an interesting doc from Nvidia about their GI system:
If you read it, notice a few things like downsampling that has to be done to increase speed (meaning it’s less realistic and lower quality), and how it can’t be used on lower-end systems. And that’s probably the best dynamic GI solution that’s available right now–Cryengine and Enlighten aren’t as good.
I stand by my previous points, unless you have a proper use for Dynamic lighting, then it’s worthless and adds unnecessary overhead. Plus, we have stationary lights, which are designed to cover all the dynamic and precomputed needs in one go. They’re very powerful, and do all the shadow casting for dynamic objects while still giving you precomputed shadows on static objects for better performance.
You don’t get light bouncing of course. I don’t believe that there’s currently any real solution for DGI with Indirect Lighting for a huge outdoor scene that’s going to be useful on all platforms. If there is, it’s going to look poor in comparison to Precomputed Lighting.
My main point however, was that lights aren’t the only thing that sell an outdoor environment. If you don’t have a convincing scene in unlit view, you won’t get one in lit view, regardless of how the lighting works.
Well CryTek manage it with there LPV solution, also I’ve rarely heard anybody complain about Enlighten and using some precomp with dynamic radiosity. I’ll keep looking through and seeing what people are coming up with in the threads, indoor scenes in UE4 equal pure eye candy but I’ve still to see something on par with CE for outdoor scenes. It’s a learning process and I’m sure it’ll all come together at some point, I have to admit I’m not a massive fan of lightmass though.
Personally I think you should have the choice between the open source version of Unreal and one bundled with Enlighten, I might contact Epic and see what the process is.
@ darth viper
Please explain why Enlighten isn’t as good? Irrelevant of that they look good, so one can’t complain.
The first one is impressive must admit, I understand content. I’m not new to games just to UE4, main problem with lightmass is I’ve found it inconsistent and ran into a fair few issues with it…
As I say it’s a learning process and I’ve used Enlighten a fair amount before.
For the sake of making sure everyone is on the same page.
When referring to GI for outdoor environments, skylight and bounced light from the sun are both considered as GI, though they both simulated using different tech. Skylight can already be made to be dynamic except for the shadows/occlusion. When used with atmospheric fog, the sky will change based on sun location, and the skylight capture(if setup to update dynamically) will reflect the change in sky color. (Dynamic skylight shadows are in the works and an early version will be in 4.3).
Bounced light for an outdoor scene is nice, and LPV seems to work great for this(it’s the indoor scenes where light leaking causes problems). But it’s not really needed to make an out door scene look great unless there are specific area that really need the extra light.
Also, the argument of whether static or dynamic looks more realistic is referring to two different types of realism.
Static GI will have far more realism when it comes to lighting calculations and visual quality on a static world. But at the same time, is completely unrealistic in world where lighting and/or the environment needs to dynamically moving around.
Dynamic GI will have far more realism when the lighting or the environment is dynamically moving around, but the lighting calculations will be of much lower quality than pre-rendered light maps.
That’s correct, currently LPV is really only useful for outdoor environments to add a bit more realism to that type of lighting, but currently doesn’t work well for indoor settings because of its quality limitations—mainly it’s the difference between directional light lighting the scene vs. things like spot lights and point lights that are used indoors.
Thing is I couldn’t really care about the specifics of radiosity vs. LPV vs. Static mapping, I have know how it’s all put together and implemented earlier versions of Enlighten into an engine.
Thing I care about is speed, whilst CryEngines version of LPV might not be the most accurate fact of the matter is creating good looking huge outdoor scenes is a very quick process. Procedurally, I’d use the LPV for outdoor scenes and use Lightmass for interiors.
I might check out 4.3, seems a lot of cool things are going on. I’m still using Unity at this point, but it’s interesting to keep an eye out.
Per level, you could, but on a map when you want to use LPV you have to turn off precomputed lighting and then rebuild the lighting which will get rid of any baked lighting. I’m not sure what happens if you use level streaming.