Global Illumination alternatives

[Graute]

Has anyone tried DFGI with lots of foliage? I ask because my lightmass time for even small maps is huge with a lot of foliage. As a single person developer it would be nice to just set it and forget it.

I´m using the Master branch, and have no problems with large forests, even with highpoly/texture assets from the kitedemo, getting interior lightning right is more challenging though.

It might be different on older hardware, since only tested on Titan/GTX 980 cards.

[Dashiva]

I´m using the Master branch, and have no problems with large forests, even with highpoly/texture assets from the kitedemo, getting interior lightning right is more challenging though.

It might be different on older hardware, since only tested on Titan/GTX 980 cards.

Is there a massive frame drop when you use more than a couple of interior lights?

[Graute]

Is there a massive frame drop when you use more than a couple of interior lights?

Depends on the settings, but main problem is artifacts from distant fields AO/GI, but it´s not so obvious on textured surfaces.

[hallatore]

Has anyone tried DFGI with lots of foliage? I ask because my lightmass time for even small maps is huge with a lot of foliage. As a single person developer it would be nice to just set it and forget it.

I have DFGI turned off for foliage. (Why would you want it applied to foliage?)

I get decent fps and everything is dynamic in this scene

[MAGtechnologies]

I am using distance field shadows, looks the same in and out of editor. Its necessary for my p[roject but I am looking at AHR as an alternative.

Here is how my distance field shadows look in a high poly stress test (2.5 million Polys) with 1 distance shadow field at 70% resolution (1 dynamic light source for the scene).

[Frenetic Pony]

I have DFGI turned off for foliage. (Why would you want it applied to foliage?)

I get decent fps and everything is dynamic in this scene

Cause it should be applied to everything? At the very least the trees, I can see grass being overkill on fps for affecting GI, which is why I suggested just going for screenspace directional occlusion/raytraced reflections and calling that good enough. But ideally you'd have it affecting everything equally.

But I suppose since it's not been updated the low sampling is still there for foliage getting contribution from DFGI. Which is why you just clump foliage/particles/etc. into boxes and take samples from the center.

[Frenetic Pony]

Also, since the first paper I ever saw on surfels was for small scale ambient occlusion, is there any idea for using it for that as well? Dynamic ambient occlusion could be yet another improvement, and would have definitive benefits over SSAO, as the haloing, or nowadays (damned kids!) anti haloing artifacts around large depth discontinuities is pretty distracting.

[_cDub]

The trello board for the ue4 roadmap under Dynamic GI it says R & D may not pan out. Will DFGI make it into a final ue4 build?

[diegor]

CRYENGINE now primarily uses cubemaps from environment probes to handle GI. They even suggest you turn off traditional LPV GI.

Can such a system be implemented into UE4?

Why isnt anybody trying to implement this , i shouldnt be too difficult and even if isnt as acurate as something like voxel ray tracing , it looks nice , could be used in dynamic enviroments and is very fast.

[Sungwoo Lee]

Fully dynamic, no lightmaps:

Wow!!It looks great! How did you get this? DFGI or any other method?

[iniside]

Why isnt anybody trying to implement this , i shouldnt be too difficult and even if isnt as acurate as something like voxel ray tracing , it looks nice , could be used in dynamic enviroments and is very fast.

It can't be used in dynamic environments, because captured cubemap is static.

[max.pareschi]

You are looking at the prototype that was in 4.7. DFGI (4.8) does NOT sample SceneColor. Surfels (oriented disks) are placed all over meshes capturing their position and diffuse color. Those are then lit with shadowing to compute how much light they should bounce. Then the scene is lit with the surfels as if they are point lights - Virtual Point Lights. Distance field occlusion is used to shadow these VPLs.

Even with 4.8, I don't have emissive hooked up yet. It should work well for a single object like that, but not for small bright emissive spots due to the surfel disks being fairly sparse.

Ah the old sampling problems

Could the work on Multiple Importance Sampling that's done in offline renders (like Modo's new upcoming additions) solve this particular sampling problem?
Seems like the surfels sampling position could benefit from it.



https://graphics.stanford.edu/course...h-chapter9.pdf


Or maybe I'm just blabbering and I really don't know what I'm talking about.

[max.pareschi]

Why isnt anybody trying to implement this , i shouldnt be too difficult and even if isnt as acurate as something like voxel ray tracing , it looks nice , could be used in dynamic enviroments and is very fast.
It can't be used in dynamic environments, because captured cubemap is static.

Besides, we already have that kind of system using spherical captures that push diffuse information on surfaces using a console command. Don't remember which though maybe something on the lines of "r.diffuseFromCaptures = 1", you need to search the forums I think someone has made a brief tutorial along with a discussion in another thread.

[joshezzell]

Besides, we already have that kind of system using spherical captures that push diffuse information on surfaces using a console command. Don't remember which though maybe something on the lines of "r.diffuseFromCaptures = 1", you need to search the forums I think someone has made a brief tutorial along with a discussion in another thread.

This doesn't work properly though. The way it's setup doesn't make it an easy workflow choice.

[diegor]

It can't be used in dynamic environments, because captured cubemap is static.

Cube map are not inherently static , other game engines like unity can render them dynamically in an efficient way , because the rendering is distributed is distributed across several frames and you can even create scripts that makes them to only be rendered again when http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class...tionProbe.html

This doesn't work properly though. The way it's setup doesn't make it an easy workflow choice.

Can you further elaborate on this , do you mean that that cube maps have to be carefully placed in lighted areas , in that case , what can be done to improve this system , aside from better dynamic cubemaps , maybe automatic placement of them