So, I know that SVOGI has gone the way of, well, not being in Rocket, but I was curious as to what solutions are implemented/you guys are planning to implement for dynamic lighting? I know Dynamic GI is really complex and taxing, but if other engine vendors (aka Crytek and Geomerics, etc) have fully dynamic solutions, I am curious why Epic would be lagging behind. Although, I fully admit that I have ZERO idea of what you guys are planning, so it would be nice to see what you are thinking about this. I am sorry if this overlaps with other threads, as I would hope some others would have asked a similar question.
+1 on this question. Am also curious to know more about this. If SVOGI is resource consuming then why not integrate Geomerics or Autodesk Beast? (Personally i think SVOGI looks much better)
Beast is still static lighting.
Although there are other GI dynamic GI solution. Screen Space, LPV, or maybe something completly new. I’d really like to have for outdoor lighting. I’m not fan of baking lighting for big outdoor areas.
And actually, even if you don’t want to implement a fully dynamic lighting solution, could you at least allow for people using the editor to see lightmass (or near it) quality in realtime so they don’t have to bake lighting very often? I think Geomerics works so that the artist gets realtime lighting, and they can choose to go static in the end result, if they want to (at least that is what I got from their website).
We spent some time working on improved static lighting methods (Lightmass, Reflection Environment, Stationary Lights, etc.) because we felt they were the right tradeoff for console games, especially if they are interested in targeting 60Hz.
On the dynamic side of things we have thus far focused on deferred shading with shadowmaps for direct lighting and tiled deferred shading for efficient rendering of unshadowed lights. We have a number of ideas for how we’d like to improve our dynamic lighting path:
Various optimizations to enable more dynamic shadows with lower cost: caching, proxy geometry for quicker rendering of shadowmaps, etc.
We’ve made some recent improvements to shadow filtering but hope to do more.
We’re thinking of methods of approximating large scale ambient occlusion for the purpose of shadowing the sky / ambient cube map. A solution here could add a lot of depth and soft shadows to a scene without a full GI solution.
We’re still interested in methods for computing dynamic GI. Light propagation volumes are an interesting possibility but have some pretty big limitations. Enlighten is a good solution but requires some precomputation and primarily static geometry. If we investigate methods we are likely to focus on fully dynamic solutions.
We don’t have a timeline on when we will invest more time in improving our dynamic lighting but it’s on our minds.
I just wanted to expand on this answer a bit, we actually have experimental support for Light Propagation Volumes. It’s not really ready for prime time yet, but you can modify your INI to get a preview. See this forum thread for details:
We’ll improve on it over time and are also thinking of other features to improve dynamic lighting in UE4. I also wanted to point to our lighting and shadowing documentation. As we add new features and make them available we will also add them to our documentation!
