Runtime GI

Unity Engine
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I think official is planning to implement inhouse GI solution long time ago but ends up return back Enligten. I would like to know does official still working on inhouse GI solution that does not rely on Raytracing? I would like to see Runtime GI solution happening at both URP and HDRP.

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The team have been progressing on our communicated update on global illumination 2021 . This means that we are continuing on our planned path for deprecating Enlighten Realtime GI and replacing the use cases it enables with our in-house solution. Our goal is for the solution to run on both URP and HDRP.

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I would like to add more context that I expect GI solution that work at runtime that doesn’t need to do any pre-baking process. Will official implement it?

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Hi,

We have planned for handling the scenario of static geometry and dynamic lighting (like Enlighten) that will be release first and imply pre-computation step, and another plan for fully dynamic lighting and geometry with no precomputation after in order to fit with our large number of supported platform.

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That’s excellent news! Do you have any ETA on this? Enlighten is supposed to be deprecated (again) in 2023 as per this official post , so does that mean we’ll have something working before the end of next year?
Can you share more informations on how it is supposed to work? (what techniques are in use? Is it supposed to work alongside/replace APV?..)

The whole situation around realtime GI in Unity was an absolute mess (Enlighten being deprecated without any replacement available, said replacement solution being eventually sent into oblivion without further comments, then Enlighten added back without any of its missing updates…), and I can’t help but wonder why no communication was made around this.
I understand performant realtime GI is a massive undertaking, but I don’t think some level of transparency on the work and progress done would actually hurt anyone.

Anyways, can’t wait to see what you’ve got in store for that!

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Do you plan to allow the pre-computation step to be baked/updated/modified on demand in runtime (like after procedurally generating the scene or modifying it) or is it planned only for ‘offline’ editor baking?

Thanks.

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The first iteration will likely not support a pre-computation step on demand at runtime, however this is something we can consider as an improvement on our roadmap for the future.

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Can you share more informations on how it is supposed to work?

Hi for the static geometry / dynamic lighting scenario we rely on light probe system that can be relighted at runtime, you can think of it as a sort of DDGI but with a baking step.

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Will this ‘fully dynamic lighting and geometry with no precomputation’ mode be an extension of the same system as the baked version? I mean do you plan to have one base system for both modes? Or maybe the plan is to have two separate systems with more differences than just baked/dynamic modes?

What about ‘dynamic lighting and geometry with no precomputation’ mode. Will it be based on light probes/some kind of DDGI but with a dynamic geometry update?

Thanks.

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Hi, does it mean that this in-house solution will not rely on light maps?

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Do you mean new apv state blending or it will be another system

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Interesting, thanks for your answer! I’m really curious about the baking part though, what informations are getting baked?

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no lightmaps indeed.

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another system. apv state blending is lerp static information, here we refer to dynamic relighting

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We bake offline the information that are required to relight at runtime.
Conceptually, you can think about it as capturing a mini gbuffer cubemap offline and relighting at runtime.

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Also note that in the meantime, for non pre-computed real-time GI on PC and Consoles you can use SSGI in HDRP since 20LTS (with a lot of improvements in 21LTS).
It offers various interesting options and modes (eg: ray miss fallback on APVs, probes, sky and mixed tracing mode with raytracing) that can make it very useful in many situations if well setup.
Nice example here.
Forum thread here.

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Hi, will these information (“New Enlighten”, “Full Real Time GI”) appear on the GI roadmap?

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@Matjio If i am understanding correctly, u guys are working on both a precomputed GI and another a complete dynamic one? Is this correct? Is the complete dynamic one similar to lumen, does it handle reflections too??

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Is it possible that in the future the new GI will use raytracing api optionally to achieve better quality/faster updates (like using more probes and updating them faster/more often). Or maybe the plan is to not use raytracing for this system at all, even optionally.

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Hi,

For the remaining question we will not go into detail as we are at a very early stage.
We don’t have ETA for both system thus why they aren’t on the roadmap yet.

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