I just watched the Digital Foundry video that covers GOW4 and they point out that this iteration of the series makes use of a realtime GI solution of some kind: https://youtu.be/A99kon29MbU?t=3m44s
Anyone have any insight on what solution this is and if it’s possible for us humble developers without graphics programming teams of our own (save, of course, for the lovely developers at Epic!) to make use of it? My first guess is that this is Light Propagation Volumes at work in combination with some baked lighting via Lightmass, but I can’t seem to get both to work simultaneously when I try it. I can get LPV going fine on its own, but when I try to add in any static lighting, the LPV contribution to the scene just disappears. The documentation for this feature *does * instruct users to disable all static lighting: A new, community-hosted Unreal Engine Wiki - Announcements and Releases - Unreal Engine Forums
Enlighten is pretty well integrated with Unity and wouldn’t be a convenient or cost-effective solution for a team working with Unreal Engine, so I highly doubt it. Also, Enlighten doesn’t support moveable objects. UE4 already has LPV and Nvidia’s VXGI is also an option that’s somewhat proven.
According to Digital Foundry, Wikipedia, and just judging by its looks, yes, they’re using UE4.
Spotted that back in the first trailer they released last year, in that exact location oddly enough. Honestly, I think it’s probably faked for that particular area. Like Alien Isolation, LPV can be made to look pretty good in areas of low light intensity where artefacts are hidden. Then again it’s entirely possible that The Coalition developed their own solution. They added volumetric volumes and other things after all.
Don’t forget, the Coalition is a massive studio, with a monstor budget and good ties with Epic / Engine team. They could pretty much do whatever the heck they wanted, hell they hacked chunks of UE4’s renderer into UE3 for the Gears 1 Remaster.
And yeah, definitely UE4. Would recognise those lens flares anywhere!
Enlighten has support for UE4 so if they wanted to use it they could license it, but I doubt it.
Most likely it’s similar to what they did in The Last of Us, they had the same effect but it only worked with flashlights and wasn’t accurate in any way.
My guess is it’s a cheap, inaccurate, hacked solution only for flash lights. I wonder if it’s any better than putting a point light near the surface the light is hitting, sampling a low mipped color from the texture, and adding that to the indirect lighting around that area.
Looks like reflective shadow maps with VPL splatting and no indirect shadowing. Same thing done in The Last of Us and Uncharted 4. Short range, too expensive for large lights, and no shadowing. Slightly useful for a cheap(ish) flashlight effect, but that’s it really.