[REQUEST]Lightmass and GPU

Development Rendering
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1

Hey guys, I absolutely LOVE async lighting builds, but I think it would be really awesome if you can do a non-async build (aka you can’t work on the level) but build using the GPU. During this build, the scene would stop getting rendered every frame and instead just leave the last frame on the screen - that way you can see the world but it doesn’t use much GPU resources. Then the computer uses the GPU to do really fast builds. Ideally, you could also use the GPU on server builds too, but I am more concerned on single-PC builds. Is this something you are looking into or have even considered? I think it would be really helpful for single PC developers like me who want to do a production build without it taking so long…

Thanks!!

2

We would love to do something like this. The ideal is a lighting algorithm which renders in realtime using the GPU when you are previewing, but then can be baked down into lightmaps using the same algorithm when you are ready to build.

There are some challenges though - it would be hard to make the editor scale down (DX10 for example), we would have to re-write all of our GI methods, we probably couldn’t get as high of quality of end results, and it could make using the editor much less stable (heavy load on GPUs is notoriously unstable).