Whats Wrong with Epic? Dynamic Lighting, GI and Shadows!!

[Poet_11 (William K)]

@mariomguy;711002

Reduce the shadow distance and use far shadow cascades. Disable objects that don’t need to be casting shadows, especially far shadows (anything underneath a larger object already casting a shadow, for instance). Optimize for your target platform. Use contact shadows to kick up the detail in some missing spaces. Be glad you’re not making a game for the PS2, or the PS1.

Pixar did not have enough money nor the technology available to put indirect lighting in Finding Nemo, and that was rendered by one of the world’s largest supercomputers owned by ILM. Now you want this tech running in realtime in a video game on 4-year-old relatively inexpensive consumer-level hardware. We’re not there yet. Patience. Use direct lighting with skylights and ambient occlusion to provide local shadowing. If you want something better than that we have precomputed solutions. Static lights allow you to set the mood of any environment, so you can fill the world with lights to your heart’s content. Otherwise, you’ll just have to wait. I imagine Epic made the decision to focus more on broadening the engine’s reach and less on dynamic lighting. Even the most powerful graphics cards are brought to their knees with dynamic lighting. Games are just starting to feature this sort of technology, and it’s still a child in terms of development. I am making a game right now that has been optimized to hell and back and I still can’t get it to run 60 FPS 1080p with LPV, and this is on a GTX 1070. I am always moments away from making the decision to kick it in the sand and go back to direct lighting.

Agreed on most points, however I have to say that shadow cascades still have some serious problems for medium and wide shots, they lose their quality and detail quickly, the option is there to readjust the quality per scene on a fixed camera but not when things are moving and this issue further becomes a problem when you are dealing with long lenses.

I would love to have GI but these days it is unrealistic with performance, plus I haven’t seen good GI solutions running on any available engine, half baked solutions mostly.

And I have yet to see GI run in an open world game running on a console.

For interior exterior lighting in real time, other solutions could be developed to address the problem.