We have scheduled this for a dot release. There is a long list of features we want to add to the GI solution and this is one of the most top ranking ones.
any idea on which .x version will bring it on? I’m not trying to nail you to a specific one, but I just want to get an idea about “how far away in time” this might be…
Hey Metron,
Even if we pinned it to a specific dot release we would not be able to predict when would that be released. As Jesper said, it’s high on our list of things to do after 5.0 ships.
What is bounce light shadowing exactly? I’m mostly playing around with point and spot lights and I do see light bounce “properly”. What does Directional Light bounced light do that point and spot, doesn’t?
Great to hear! Looking forward to this feature, too! Because you know, dynamic GI is awesome, but with only directional light and static objects support its pretty limited.
@AcidArrow as I understand it, if you put another block behind the block on the right, light will be bounced onto the back of the block in the middle (previously the right most block). As though the light had traveled straight through the first block, bounced off the second block and landed on the back of the first.
@AcidArrow yeah. Luckily the GI is real time, so we should be able to work around it by just switching the light off when you’re not in the room or something.
Yeah, it would be nice if it “just worked”, but I think it can be fairly easily worked around.
At this point in time, I’m a bit more worried on how long enlighten takes to precompute things. I wouldn’t say it’s slow because what it’s doing is far more complex than what Beast did, but I’m kind of afraid of opening one of my bigger scenes and try to apply some sort of high density lighting (static or dynamic) to it.
That’s indeed the case that doesn’t work yet. It will though…
But as you can see, it’s already fine to use it if e.g. you’re limited to one room or generally don’t see past the wall on which the local light is shining.
As for the precompute times: they heavily depend on the amount of output texels (so realtime GI resolution) and charts (UV islands) in the realtime UVs.
The first step should always be to check the “GI - Charts” view as it shows you the resolution and the different colors refer to different charts. Generally texels 1 world unit big are a good start, but the resolution can be increased for indoor scenes and decreased for outdoor ones. That can be done globally or per system via lightmap params.
The renderer has some properties (Lighting/Lightmapping window > Object tab) that control auto UVs – a UV simplification algorithm that can help you lower the amount of charts and reduce the amount of unwated seams while preserving the wanted ones. Changes to those parameters have an immediate effect in the “GI - Charts” view, but they take time to trickle down through the entire pipeline.
We will have general guidelines on how to tweak those parameters to get the best results in the smallest amount of time and some examples from the Viking Village should serve the purpose well.
@Kuba , I understand, I’ll definitely look into this (and I’ve already played a bit with the auto-uv options and lightmap parameters).
My main issue right now, is that static lightmap quality is tied to the precomputed quality (that if I understand correctly, it just upscales the data from precomputed, and it adds direct light at high res). For Arch-viz style graphics, really dense lightmaps, where every lightmap pixel counts are pretty much a must. So if I want a static lightmap with res of say 50 (which I often do, for small scenes) where every pixel counts, I have to also precompute at resolution 50, which, at the very least in the beta and with my kinda old current computer is close to impossible. (and it wasn’t with Beast)
With that said, I’ll definitely play with the variety of settings more. I actually like learning a new system and find how to play to its strengths. I’m just a little bit uncomfortable that it seems that my previous workflow has become much harder to achieve. (at least, as I said, with the current beta and my current rig, both which are probably subject to major change).
The resolution for the precompute and the static light map are totally separate. You can do a precompute with one texel per unit and a static lightmap with fifty. Note that you’ll want to set your lights to static GI.
If the precompute misses indirect contact shadows (by say having a really low resolution), then, no matter what res the static GI is, it won’t be there.