We still have to deal with lightmaps in Unity when other engines like cryengine, beast or frostbite offer a dynamic lighting solution.
the resulting lighting of these engines is amazing not to mention the efficiency boost in production.
Is the same thing coming soon in Unity? Are you guys working on it?
Yeah lightmapping is bang out of date. I can’t think of any use for it, since the realtime solutions can typically draw all a mobile game needs for its lightmaps to a texture within a second of loading the level, if need be.
There’s no real sanity or use for beast in my view. I know light probes are a good thing, but guess what - they’re just as quick to bake for stuff like enlighten.
Plus being able to lazy-update lighting for time of day is just a wonderful thing among other uses.
Er what.
Unity has had dynamic lighting since version 1.0.
Do you mean realtime GI?
Someone did that sparse voxel cone tracing GI demo for the DX11 competition, hopefully it will get polished and make it’s way to the asset store.
I use dynamic lights and shadows all the time in Unity. What are you meaning?
Wait, so is there a way to turn lights (lightmaps, specifically) on and off in Unity Free?
No way. Some of the effects we get with lightmapped scenes take giant dumps all over what could be done with realtime lighting even on desktop PCs… and we’re doing it on mobiles. Yes there’s the drawback that it’s not dynamic, but for our use cases the increased fidelity is more important.
Guess battlefield 2 and 3 suck visually? but hey, guess what? you get more fidelity out of the realtime solution AND can still bake for performance. Why more? well because it allows artists to constantly iteriate in realtime to refine it to the point where it frankly looks better than the baked version. There’s only so much time an artist has to experiment and get great lighting. If his 1 week budget is half blown on render times then it’s not looking all that good.
When you show these hot VRAY pics next to a realtime solution, sure something gives. But bear in mind it took a lot of trial and error, a lot of artist experimenting. Do you have an artist so hot he doesn’t need to do R&D? what do you think a typical studio will benefit the most from? the ability to iteriate in realtime (and bake still, lets not forget) or learn his specialised trade with VRAY? cos if we’re talking about fidelity here as an argument, we’re not talking about Beast.
Just about the only thing missing from unity is a fantastic GI solution in order to pretty much mimic what Beast does. And something like enlighten would do that. It’s an end to end solution from console to mobile. Let’s have it.
I love Beast, but Enlighten is DEFINITELY in the right direction… there are times when I don’t want to bake out lightmaps and want to see my changes right away, especially for a game that has a lot of things going on in a single level… if I want to have flickering light that works with GI, Enlighten would be it. but I can imagine it costing UT an arm and a leg for integration… like I was doing some lighting tests for a level I made, and I had to wait for Beast to finish baking before I did anymore work…
At least with a real time solution, I don’t have to wait, everything is RIGHT THERE…
Interesting that Epic dropped it’s realtime GI for UE4 in favor for static lighting.
I just heard about that…
Epic Rendering Lead answer questions about that decision:
http://forums.epicgames.com/threads/950908-UE4-will-use-Lightmass-for-its-lighting-system!?p=31241619&viewfull=1#post31241619
Also I can understand why they’ve decided to remove GI from UE4. They still want to make UE to run really fast (faster than UE3). I’ve personally asked an Epic dev and he told me they are targeting mobile hardware with UE4. So Unity, prepare for that! ^^
Some of the new rendering features in UE4:
There have been quite a few improvements to dynamic lighting techniques or methods that work well with dynamic lighting in UE4, over UE3:
Deferred shading everywhere! This is a huge one.
Tiled deferred shading - provides further benefits when many lights are on screen. Over a thousand on-screen in Infiltrator.
Subsurface shadowing of SSS materials
Screen space reflections
Image based lens flares (picks up any bright spot, doesn’t need to be preplaced)
SSAO has been improved
CSM is quite a bit faster due to culling
Overall shadow depth rendering is faster, uses position only stream, better organization of vertices for locality
Cubemap ambient term, provides specular in unshadowed areas
Precomputed Shadows (I want to see this feature in Unity).
I mean dynamic GI lighting like battlefield or crysis.
That’s interesting.
Oh i want this feature in Unity too…