Thought these were quite nice. You can try the demos for yourself and see the comparisons between raytraced reference and Unity’s up coming lights. I’m not sure how it stacks up against lux or alloy, but it looks quite fast to calculate and quite accurate. Can have it textured or any poly shape apparently?
Here’s the link Unity Labs | Unity
Thoughts?
Does this mean Unity is better than Unreal now and the debate is over?
Dunno about that, I love all engines tbh. Why wouldn’t I as a game dev 
Blitz 4 lyfe.
They need to brush up on their marketing. That title is an awful way to say “area lights”. 
Lots of big words…But it looks super cool.
I see the quad area lights. What I really want to see is an emissive material actually emit light like area lights do. Is that part of this upcoming tech? It looks pretty, but that request would be top of the line.
Like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLRgEN7AQgM
Around 2:35 has it… I guess it would need some fun from enlighten to really take shape.
pretty impressive. Not sure how resource hungry that is though…
Yeah, if you want to read something about area lights in English: https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/simulating-area-lights-in-ue4
It’s super cool, I often use diffuser cards… It really just depends how heavy it is and do we have to do anything special with shaderlab when we create our own shaders? Might be a dumb question but it does mention GGX BRDF approximation with LTC, hopefully we can just define GGX and that’s about it…
*Cough or get a material editor…
No. But it probably means that mixed mode lighting will remain broken despite all the new features.
So this exactly. Why has Enlighten been basically ignored since its debut? At some point we were supposed to get Enlighten reflections and Enlighten destructible objects. And what happened to progressive light map baking? Thought we’d see some more of that at Unite instead of an hour and half of talk about how they’re raising the price of the they’re products.
I don’t want to complain, but I’m getting skeptical of Unity’s direction. I’m not sure why they are working on things like these area lights (which already basically exist on the asset store) instead of working on creating things that people developing for the asset store can’t make. Like, for instance, improvements to Enlighten or integration with PowerVR. The only obvious answer to me is that their deals with Enlighten / PowerVR don’t go quite as deep as they originally believed and now they’ve got to cover up for their mistakes. And if so, this leaves me questioning Unity’s future as the best possible option for game development. Its unbelievable to me the amount of stuff they’ve presented at some talk labeled as coming soon only to come out with it years later.
I know integrating all this stuff is ridiculously complex and I know they don’t want to come out with half backed implementations of stuff, but lets be honest, thats most of what Unity 5 has been. Don’t get me wrong, there is tons of stuff I love about what Unity has been doing, their peripheries have been great, integration with analytics was beautiful (aside from the limited information offered online) for instance. But just the meat and potatoes of their engine seem to be going in a different direction than I’d like.
But perhaps my goals have changed over the years and maybe now Unity is pursuing different things than I and that is neither good not bad. Regardless, I’m getting a little worried and more than that a little sad about the possibility of where I and Unity will stand in five years if it continues on this trajectory. I hope I’m wrong though, I really do.
Could we have like a mesh sphere that emits light? Like could I model a lightbulb and then make it a light and it all works great?
I am more interested if they play well with the enlighten and upcoming powervr solution.
I’m guessing they don’t.
For the impatient, the WebGL demo is very cool!
http://blog.selfshadow.com/sandbox/ltc.html
I dont understand the use of the word impatient, because a unity sample project that allows us to use these area lights in our own unity projects already exists:
I think this is awesome and the guys working on this have done an amazing job.
I don’t agree with unity shouldn’t bother because of there’s the same thing on the asset store.
NOT AT ALL!!
This is the right direction and I’m grateful that they invested time and money into this. Big huge thumbs up.
Enlighten’s issues are far more complex than me or the average users understanding… so lets not just throw out there they should have fixed enlighten instead, or that they haven’t bothered to try and fix it. that’s so far from the truth that it’s annoying.
You could do that in 5.0. Put an emissive material on something, wait for a looong time for lightmaps to compute.
Now all we need is a volumetric fog that works with those area lights, like we saw in Unity’s last cinematic demo… only available for all mortals out the box, and Unity’s ready for CGI film production!
But i want to produce game 
Too late! 