This is specifically about dynamic GI, not dynamic lighting in general. Dynamic GI is the thing everyone wants, and UE4 already supports dynamic lighting, just not a good dynamic GI solution.
Most games that use a dynamic lighting system have some kind of faked dynamic GI–because doing it properly is too slow. Enlighten has lots of issues, it still requires precomputing which is very slow, and it only works on static meshes, which greatly limits what you can do. Other games use lots of tricks to give something that kind of looks like GI, but isn’t nearly as good as the results as SVOGI/VXGI. Epic has experimented with a few solutions, like LPV and Distance Field GI, but none of them give good enough results.
UE4 has only Lightmass, we have no good dynamic lighting solution! Scenes created with a directonal and a sky light are not a dynmic lighting solution! You can’t ship a game in this constilation, it will look horrible.
With fully dynamic lighting i mean, you don’t have to bake maps for shadows and GI for hours… The Division or Cryteks old probe based ligting system can give you amazing details by baking only the GI for your secene
in a probe, this takes seconds… and it’s not faked… And we have nothing like this in UE4, that means we have no dynmaic lighting solution at all. Every other engine has…
I mean there is no room to argue, you simply can’t compare our Directonal and Sky light with a probe based lighting solution like in the Divison or other games like assassins creed syndicate, Battlefront 3 and so on…
All this games have a day and night cycle and are looking just amazing, you will never receive the same quality or even something near with a directonal and skylight, you can’t even compare this two “solutions”.
And you can repeat over an over again that some or even all of this lighting systems have their issues but this didn’t change the fact, that games like The Division, Star Wars Battlefront, Everybodys gone to the rapture, Kingdom Come, Far Cry, Battlefield and so on… Are looking amzing and they can be played on consoles. Succesfull games are shiped with this lighting solutions, so you can list 1000 issues you see but if this systems would be so bad no studio would use them, games wouldn’t be developed with them.
And just be clear i’m not against UE4, it is my favorite engine by far… it’s just sad that we have no fully dynamic lighting solution.
No, UE4 does have a dynamic lighting solution–all lights can cast dynamic shadows and it uses a deferred renderer which allows for many dynamic lights that don’t cast shadows. What it doesn’t have is a very good dynamic GI solution–that’s what we’re talking about here, making the lighting more realistic by making it look like it has bounce lighting. Many games start with a deferred renderer solution and then add some type of faked GI system, and they are designed specifically for how the game will use them, not as a solution that would work in most games.
With Enlighten, the only difference is that you can move the lights around, if you have an animated mesh, or a mesh that doesn’t exist at the start of the game then it doesn’t take part in the dynamic GI and instead uses light probes to try and fake the GI. That’s similar to what UE4 does, lightmass bakes the GI to lightmaps, and uses light probes for animated meshes. The only difference is that you can’t animate lights in UE4 and have them cast dynamic GI.
You could use something like VXGI currently in certain situations, if you lower the voxel density and turn off specular reflections and stuff like that. All the games currently have to make sacrifices in dynamic GI quality for it to run well, none of the solutions that those games use is as good as quality that you would get using VXGI/SVOGI.
Jesus… all the games i have listed, all the engines, they didn’t fake GI, you really need to read a bit more about other engines.
Yes we have a dynamic directonal light, yes we have spot and point lights etc… but they are worthless, you have to build your ligting or you scene will look simply horrible.
A fully dynamic lighting system comes hand in hand with GI, and all the top engines or systems like enlighten they have their own solutions, there is nothing faked, if the GI is not calculated
in real time like in SVOTI, it is baked on a texture for a probe, like in the snowdrop engine. But there is a difference like day and night when comapring UE4 “dynamic” lighting to the solutions
of SVOTI, Enlighten or Probe based Lighting like in The Division.
It is not my intentions to chnage your opinion but i gave you more than enough examples and engine names etc… So you can make a picture by your self, if you like. I think your view is not correct when it comes
to fully dynamic lighting “GI” where and how it is used. Fully dynmic lighting and GI systems are the masterpiece of engine developement. It is used alreday in games and nothing new. However i think we reached a dead point, so it makes no sense to debate more about Lighting and GI. With that said, Cheers
They ALL fake GI, even something like VXGI is a hack, it’s far more accurate than the dynamic GI systems that games have these days, but it’s not comparable to baked GI. What most games do to fake GI–they use a very small sample of GI that they can quickly calculate to add some light into the shadows which will make it look much nicer. But it’s nowhere near a full dynamic GI solution.
And no, the dynamic lighting system in UE4 isn’t useless, games like ARK use it since there’s no other way to do day/night cycles and it would be too much data anyway for a large game like that. Epic is using a fully dynamic solution for Fortnite, Eve: Valkyrie is using dynamic lighting as well.
Just for your information… One more thing…
- ARK is using a self developed probe based GI/Lighting system like in the old Cryengine version.
- Fortnite has no real GI solution they are even not using LPV
It seems that you still don’t understand the difference between a real dynamic lighting solutuion “full or partly dynamic GI” and the UE4 dynamic lighting…
There are worlds between lighting systems like SVOTI and UE4 or Enlighten and UE4.
And just to be clear UE4 has a dynmic lighting system… no question about that. What i mean is you can’t really develope a game from it casue you are getting no GI or light bouncing. To make a game look good
we need a dynamic lighting system like enlighten, svoti or svogi or vxgi to have GI and the light bouncing. Like in all the AAA games…
Probe based systems are still a way of faking GI, there’s no games that uses a complete dynamic GI solution, they all fake it to a level that they find acceptable.
In UE4 you would need to do alternatives–skylight which adds a bit of illumination to dark areas which works pretty well for outdoor games, or use LPV, or place lights manually to fake it. And again–as I said before, there are a number of games using UE4 with dynamic lighting and it’s definitely usable. It’s not the best situation, but that’s because there’s not a situation that fits enough needs of games, it’s always a case that a dynamic GI solution that works for one game won’t necessarily work for another. Once most hardware is fast enough, then VXGI can do that, and I think we’ll have to wait for that.
It’s definitly not a solution, No proffesional game or Studio would use just Directional and Sky light for their games… LPV is outdated… We are still at the begining… UE4 absolutely not usuable for games like Far Cry 4, The Division etc… It will look simply cheap…
Probe based GI is not faked, it captures your scene in a cubemap, the color… Of course it is not 100% acurate but it delivers good enough performance and quality for games like The Division.
If SVOGI level quality is acceptable then just crank VXGI settings down and you get the same quality with better performance. They are basically same exact solution only difference is how voxel structure is stored.(sparse voxel octree vs 3d clipmaps.)
If this is possible, than perfect… I never tried VXGI but from what i’m reading it is even on low settings very performnace hungry and at least not usuable on consoles.
I’m sure it is just a matter of time until VXGI will be optimized by nvidia… i mean it is like you wrote SVOTI and VXGI are not that different…
Well there are AAA games doing that, so I’m not sure what you’re thinking
What’s your definition of faked? Because that’s exactly what that means–probes are not even close to there results of GI calculations. By the way, like I said, UE4 uses probes to fake GI on dynamic objects.
Fake means it is fake and has nothing to do with the real thing… Light probes are using calculated GI from your real scene “just downscaled” in a texture, becasue of performance reasons.
An No, there is no game on the market, at least not a AAA title which is using just a Directional and SKY light, it would simply look cheap and has nothing to do with a quality game.
Even Epic developed a new lighting or let’s better say GI solution just for the KITE demo. Can you imagine how the kite demo would look just with the influance of a directional and sky light ?
Doing so would make look the engine a bad joke on GDC and the kite demo would look just cheap, so it was a must to develope a solution. So once again no proffesional game would use just a directional and sky light.
And this brings us back to the main point, we need a solution, we a need a fully dynamic light solution which supports at least light probes for GI, something svoti like would be of course better.
Even the new Batman game and ARK are using self developed solutions, they’re solutuions aren’t looking that nice but hey…
Fake means it tries to look like the real thing, light probes try to look similar to GI, but they aren’t at all “downscaled GI”, there’s no GI calculation at all. It just creates a cubemap of the location of the object and projects it as a sphere to the object, the best it can do is for example if you’re outdoors then it can make it look like you have some blue lighting from the sky, but it’s not at all close to being anything like a GI simulation.
And again, yes, Fortnite and EVE are both using directional light+skylight systems, EVE probably doesn’t even use skylight since it’s in space.
And what Epic did for the Kite demo is what every developer does, they find a solution that works for their specific situation but it’s never anything designed in a way that many people could use it.
We do need a better solution, but we aren’t going to get something that does what SVOGI/VXGI/SVOTI does faster than what they can do now, at best we can get something that will work for certain types of games, like LPV or light probes and that’s it. Enlighten can’t do that since it doesn’t work with dynamic objects. We have to wait for hardware that can handle the larger calculations to be able to get rid of baked lighting entirely and move to a fully dynamic lighting system like VXGI.
Are you serious ? Are you trying to sell me Directional and Sky light as a solution for AAA game development ? Jesus never ever, it is not the year 1990 
When developing a AAA open world game, you have to be competitive with other games, like Battlefront, or Metal Gear Solid 5. You will never achieve the quality of this games with just a SKY and Directional light in your scene, it’s absurd. Companys like Square Enix didn’t pay huge amounts of money for using enlighten in UE4, cause there is just a little differnece between enlighteen and UE4- Directional and SKY light in a scene. They are paying this amount to make the game look good, to make the game look expensive and rich on graphic quality.
There is no solution in Ue4 right now, thats why we need Enlighten, SVOGI or VXGI in UE4, you will never achieve a quality game “Graphics” by using only the Directional and SKY light, it’s simply not possible… Jesus please you can’t be serious 
And for the Kite demo, GI was developed to make the scene look good, thats it… Cause this is what Directional and SKY light can’t do, it makes look a scene just cheap, there is no quality in it.
We clearly have a different understanding when it comes to quality so this little conversation won’t never end, i guess
Adik - you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about whatsoever. MGS V, The Witcher 3, Bloodborne and most other open world games only use a skylight and a directional light.
I think you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about… Metal Gear Solid 5 is developed on the Fox Engine, It’s the same engine P.T was developed with. They don’t have just a Directional and Skylight, they also have a very good GI solution basically they are also using light probes.
Left side, just directional and sky light. Right side, generated cube map for GI and light bouncing / indirect light.
The same goes for the Witcher 3 and all the other games, all of them are using some kind of GI and indirect lighting, no matter if probes or fully dynamic GI. A game developed only with the power of a directional and sky light, will have no GI, will have no indirect lighting / bouncing… as a result it wont look good.
Some games definitely use a setup like that. And something like Battlefront doesn’t even benefit from Enlighten because all of the scenes are static–Enlighten is designed for animated lighting, so dynamic time of day–which isn’t something that happens in battlefront. You could bake that with Lightmass in UE4 and get good/better result. The Kite demo still looks pretty great without the heightfield GI:
It would be nice to have a better dynamic GI solution, but what we want is something that can replace the static lighting as well, and none of the solutions can do that without better hardware
On paper at least I think Enlighten is the smarter idea than Lightmass. Having movable, color-changing or on/off lighting with real time GI in combination with baked lighting has a lot more use cases than completely baked with no dynamic GI at all. I often read Enlighten works only for static objects. So what? Lightmass is entirely static to begin with.
Of course then you factor in the price which is 0$ for lightmass and 125k$ for Enlighten, things start to look different.
Plus, Enlighten is a lot slower to build than Lightmass
You would go out of vram trying to bake a game like battlefront or the Kite demo only with lightmass.
It would clearly look good but textures plus all the lightmaps, can you Imagine how much gb of
Vram you would need? It would be simply impossible.
Thats what i’m saying all the time, solutions like svoti or even enlighten is what we need.
When it comes to the price, of course just bigger studios can handle 125K, the only chance for the
average user to get enlighten in UE4 would be if Epic make a deal with enlighten like unity does it.