Last Voxel Baking Test
Lighting is static if its precomputed. Where its stored is just technical detail. Lightmaps, probes, voxels etc.
UE4 currently can use volumetric lightmaps(voxels) for movable objects. This system would just use same voxel based system for everything. So less shader permutations.
You can actually already have this kind of system for UE4 by forcing all objects to use volumetric lightmaps. But baking still require lightmap coordinates to be setuped.
So this is literally the same thing as UE’s semi-recent volume lightmaps, just without the pre-baked lightmaps part.
IE it costs no more than such, actually less since you’re using less ram and looking up less. But getting this to run without lightleaking, or at least acceptable lightleak, is hard. And as usual with UE4 the volume lightmaps are a half completed feature that’s been abandoned to race ahead towards some newer feature. It’d be great if you could bake and use without the static UV maps, if you could use it with world streaming, and etc.
Hells the original paper this stuff is based on, developed for Quantum Break, supported changing time of day and prebaked level destruction. Newer versions are being discussed at GDC this year for semi dynamic worlds and levels. Ah well, there’s a neverending series of requests for UE4 to do everything as best as possible all the time, so I guess you look at engines and take what you can get.
You can force all your static objects to use Volumetric Lightmaps in any recent version of UE4. Then they will use a volumetric system to receive light, and don’t need any UVs, but the spatial resolution of the 3D grid is fairly low. Non-static meshes already use this system by default.
You still need lightmap UVs to generate the Volumetric Lightmaps right now, but they can be relatively low without any impact to the quality in the spherical harmonics. This also means you need to keep static lighting enabled in your project, wasting resources you’d otherwise get back in a fully dynamic system.
I agree with you about this. Sadly this means there will be a hard switch in the technology, given how certain UE4 features aren’t really up to par compared to how they look with Raytracing (worst offender would be interior+exterior lighting IMO, aka. the terrible skylight when going indoors. SSR probably coming second place, even though we have the [really unoptimized] planar reflections).
The result is that any game made with the full Raytracing lighting capabilities in mind will look really bad without the RTX featureset. So instead of RTX becoming a nice enhancement for those that have it, it will punish users that don’t have it.
and since the technology is already here, it’s obvious that Epic will not spend time improving such base non-RTX features for this intermediate time until RTX has full adoption. As a result, I can see that non-RTX graphical features will be pretty much stalled from now on
I really want to believe it is not true, but if it is then well… my cheap Vega64 deal was not good then. GDC 2019 is now only hope if it is true or not.
The immediate future of RTX in games depends heavily on if next gen consoles will get ray tracing or not. If they do, PC gamers will have to catch up and engine developers would likely hard pivot and lean into ray tracing more than current lighting/reflection systems.
If next gen consoles don’t ray trace well, I feel like ray tracing will stall for ~5 years, get developed and improved in the background, be mostly used for tech demos and a few demanding games, but be used pretty rarely.
dxr-rtx is completely different from baking lights
epic can work on both of them in same time
for archviz we really need baked lighting
because objects are not optimized and we have lots of polys
unreal volumetric lightmaps has lower quality and its increasing render time a lot
because its computic all space not only the objects !!!
YES. Lightmap Creation is the ■■■■!!,it’s waste you life ,brother.