I mean you can, the performance is horrible with dynamic light and you have no GI but it is possible… Personally i would not create a open world game with UE4, as sad is sounds. But this is only my opinion, the guys from ARK did it… However they have developed they’re very own dynamic GI… I think they are uisng also lightprobes for GI.
Standard dynamic lighting without GI in UE4 looks simply bad for me, the quality is just cheap.
No matter if we are talking about outdoor game scenes or interior… By tweaking a lot and using hq materials and assets you can get a got look even without GI but in comparsion
with scenes that are using GI, you have no chance.
There is a reason why Archviz scenes with lightmass can look so foto realistic, you wont reach this kind of realism without GI/Indirect light bouncing.
Really? GI encompasses more than simple radiosity / diffuse light bouncing, and that’s not all that LPV is doing. It’s simply a vast improvement over a flat indirect lighting term, which is (as far as I can tell) what you get with a standard moveable skylight. FYI, I’m dealing with foliage heavy scenes.
Epic themselves do not recommend light-mapping for anything larger than “medium” size levels - obviously that’s open to interpretation, but it shouldn’t even be part of the discussion here.
Take some of the AAA Games i named like the Division, there is a reason why companys are developing and using different GI implementations in they’re engines and games, it looks simply nice and more realisitc.
If GI is just a nice feature and not more, games/developers wouldn’t use it.
Skylight is Skylight it’s not the same like GI, OK it makes the scene nicer / brighter but it didn’t provide any GI or light bouncing in your scene, it comes not even near to the effect of a GI system.
However we talked about LPV, i’m curious if EPIC will still work on it, in my opinion it is a waste of time. I mean for outdoor scenes it may work somehow, it’s not that bad… at least you get your one bounce from the SUN. I tried LPV a way back in UE4 V4.4 The scene looked ok but i had massive performnace issues with nature scenes.
You get more than one bounce with LPV, and as mentioned it works with more than just one directional light. Let’s stick to the current set of facts while we impugn LPV (it has it’s issues), shall we.
Epic didn’t do the development work on LPV in the first place, so I wouldn’t expect any other answer from them. They’ve let their own distance field tech languish, so I suspect they will push toward a more resource intensive technique as next-gen hardware permits.
No you don’t, LPV gives you just one bounce and it works only with the sun, i think you could use more than one sun “not sure never tried” but even than you get only one bounce. Even Cryteks SVOTI has only 2 bounces… and we are talking here about a brand new lighting system.
LPV gives you also no bounce from Point and Spot-lights.
What?
Tim Hobson pointed out spotlight support earlier in the thread, introduced in 4.9. LPV also supports light emission from materials. IF you haven’t used LPV since 4.4… maybe you should try it again.
Secondary bounces work fine.
It doesn’t help that the official documentation ? is out of date - specifically the features listed under “other notes” such as occlusion / emissive lighting.
Ok wow, i guess it’s time to play around with the new LPV, the funny thing is even Crytek which developed the most advanced LPV system had only one bounce.
I was going to post you this link here… Guide to Global Illumination - Rendering - Unreal Engine Forums
But it seems that a lot of things has changed… but good to know!
I gave the latest iteration of LPV a try and I was pleasantly surprised. The results you can get out of it are quite nice given the right settings. As stated before though. Cascades are desperately needed for it to be really usable. Since UE4 has no other solution for real-time GI, I wonder if we can get official word on whether there are plans to push LPV a little further or rather look into other options at this point. Thanks!
I still really like the results of LPVs as well and made quite a few enquiries in different places about the chances of further development. Unfortunately, the answers I received were always the same: There are currently no plans for real-time GI at all and even if that changes, they most likely won’t go back to LPVs. I considered asking around if any “freelance” render thread programmers would be willing and capable of looking into it, but not only is the chance of finding someone super small, I also don’t really have the budget to pay for that kind work. Maybe it could be crowd funded? 
But even in their current state, I find LPVs quite usable. Essential even, at least for my game, especially since they appear to be the only working option to occlude sky lights (I don’t get how I’m supposed to use distance field shadows in their current state). It does require a lot of work to get the right settings for each environment and I have to disable them completely for large open areas, but they still increase the visual appeal of my game tenfold with a very acceptable performance cost. The biggest problem I have with them is that ever since the 4.9 update, LPV lighting no longer smoothly fades in, but instead pops in with a very clearly visible seam, which means I have to increase the LPV size even further to accomodate for that. I couldn’t find out if that’s a bug or somehow intentional for performance reasons or something, but, well, just another thing I learned to live with. I just hope they won’t remove them completely anytime soon.
Try to increase the fade rage in the advanced properties to 10. That should give you a smooth transition.
Oh, nice, it looks like they added that with 4.16. One more reason to update my project to the latest engine version!
Oh man, good tip.
Gotta figure someone at Epic is still interested in this tech with little things like that coming in.
That addition was a change added as an Epic Friday project. As far as I’m aware there are no plans to work on LPV any further, but who knows, there could be other small changes added at some point.
That’s too bad! Cascades would greatly improve the usability of LPV and bridge the gap until you guys come up with your own real-time GI solution. Which hopefully will get some traction again soon after being put on ice for years now.
Unless something changed, Fortnite is using Distance Field GI. Epic recently made the distance field stuff roughly twice as fast with 4.16, probably due to Fortnite release.
It’s using DFAO, but I didn’t think it was using DFGI
That would be heightfield GI then. Which only supports one bounce from a terrain texture, which makes it a solution for a very limited case. And I found it’s actually broken in the latest version.
Heightfield GI is only for landscape, right? I’m pretty sure FN doesn’t use landscape
Yep, works (worked) only with landscapes.