[Twitch] Subsurface Scattering and Ray Traced Soft Shadows Demos - Oct. 16, 2014

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Thanks for a great stream folks! Given my background as a lighting artist, it was especially interesting to hear what you’re doing with soft shadowing. Very cool.

However, I was upset by 's admission of stereo (thus VR) being a second-class citizen. I’m sure that’s a practical truth, as there are many fewer VR folks than 2D folks in the mix. But I can’t help but pipe up, that the only reason I’ve joined the UE4 subscription is for it’s support of VR. For the first time since April, I’ve cancelled my subscription. I don’t say that to be a petty child, though it sounds that way. I say that because it is the practical thing for me to do.

I was the first person to report that the new SSS wasn’t working in VR. I posted it in forums and in AnswerHub probably 2 days after the 4.5 Preview was released (2 weeks ago?), so it was annoying to hear that didn’t even know it to be a problem.

Given that VR isn’t going away, but will become a larger slice of the pie in upcoming years, I would ask that some testing time be applied to making sure new features work for it. As he said, it may be a simple oversight. So why not test and fix said oversight before shipping? Especially since someone (passive-aggressive-me;) took the time to report the problem 2 weeks ago.

Also, 's quote earlier in this thread, “I don’t think we will spend time on that, dynamic lighting methods are not a good fit for VR where you need super high resolution + 90fps.” This was regarding DFAO, but I’m not clear if it is also regarding SSS in VR. I would ask that you let the users decide if a feature is too expensive for VR. If it is, we won’t use it. But if we are demo-ing on specific-built hardware (say beefy machine for a conference), we may have very good reason to use expensive features in VR. Please don’t make such assumptions for us, unless it is completely untenable.

Sorry for the rant. I know you guys are very busy, and have a LOT to take care of. I just had to get that off my chest, and make it clear that this was quite disappointing for this particular user. And , I’m sorry for singling you out. I don’t want to come off as attacking you. That’s not my goal, I just have my own biased concerns.

Andrew Weidenhammer (aka - 3dLight)

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Bloom in directional light properties overcomes that problem but then there is that weird flickering issue with bloom. We either need a better bloom solution or something else in atmospheric fog itself.

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Hi there.

I saw in the stream that there is the distance field debug view so visualize the distance fields. Is there a way that we can write a shader to volumetrically trace though the distance field to render volumetric clouds in game? The visualisation looked pretty fast so just wondering if it was possible. I’m going to have a look and see if I can find the relevant code in the source and pick it apart.

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Thanks for answering. Fair enough about VR not being first on your list, but I suppose my point was that I feel any new rendering feature should include VR support before it is released. If this is not the way your team wishes to treat VR support (this is fine, I understand there is great value in releasing to most users early), then you should properly warn customers of that. I think quite a few folks have jumped into UE4 because it DOES have great VR support. There’s no denying that, and I thank you for it! But if a new feature isn’t tested, or shown not to work in VR, I think folks would appreciate a warning, so they aren’t subscribing for heartbreak;) Am I complaining that I wasted 20 bucks? Well personally, no. I think the upgrade is huge and more than worth it, but I can’t help but think going forward it would be nice for more communication about VR support on new features.

Andrew

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Out of curiosity. Distance Fields are stored in GPU memory or in general memory ?

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Page 153. Using SDF for diffuse GI. It’s bit old, but might be worth reading.

Edit:

Paper about optimizing sphere tracing performance.