Update on Global Illumination 2021

Unity Engine
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Hi everyone,

We would like to update you on our plans for Global Illumination in 2021. Over the past year, we’ve received your feedback, and we truly appreciate it. We understand that quality, stability and production readiness are important to you for both existing and new feature sets.

In 2021, our goals are shaped by Unity’s product commitments, announced in “The road to 2021” blogpost. We want to do less and we want to do it better. This year, we’re focused on improving the quality and production readiness of the existing features while supporting the Scriptable Render Pipelines and our ambitions for Global Illumination. Continue reading to learn about upcoming updates and our plans for the 2021 release cycles.

Baked Global Illumination
In 2021, we’re concentrating on improving our Progressive Lightmapper (PLM) baking backends. Our goal is to improve the quality and stability of both CPU and GPU PLMs, with the main focus being towards improving the production readiness of the GPU PLM. We believe iteration speed is crucial when it comes to baking. We want to make sure GPU PLM is fast, stable and accessible to more of our users. This includes reducing the memory requirements of GPU PLM and the need for fallback to the CPU backend.

Enlighten will remain available as a baking backend and accessible for use in existing projects. However, it will continue to be labeled as deprecated. Since it’s possible to achieve higher-quality visual results and faster baking times using the PLM, we recommend discontinuing the use of Enlighten baking and upgrading your projects to use the CPU and GPU PLMs. The following flow chart describes our plans for Enlighten baking backend support, starting with the 2021.2 release:

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Enlighten as a baking backend will be maintained in Universal Render Pipeline and the Built-In renderer until Unity 2021 long-term support (LTS) ends. However, no new functionality will be added.

Real-time Global Illumination
One of our goals for 2021 is to enable more users to adopt the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) or High Definition Pipeline (HDRP) and improve the upgradability of existing projects from the Built-In Renderer.

We understand from your feedback that Enlighten Real-time GI support is important for many of your projects. While it doesn’t provide the feature set needed for every type of project out there, you have let us know that Enlighten is still a solution that serves many of your projects’ use cases. We also hear that the lack of support for Enlighten Real-time GI in URP and HDRP has been a blocker for you in migrating your projects to SRPs. Your feedback is always valuable to us, and we want to make sure you can continue to be successful in your projects.

Because of this, we will continue to support Enlighten Real-time GI. Our team will maintain Enlighten as-is, without adding any new features, until Unity 2024 LTS ends. As part of this plan, we will add support to URP and will re-enable support for HDRP. Additionally, we will extend the platform reach of Enlighten Real-time GI to Apple Silicon, Sony PlayStation(R) 5 and Microsoft Xbox Series X|S platforms.

We acknowledge that Enlighten Real-time GI support will not meet every use-case, and we understand that it will not scale to the needs of every product. Although we are committed to providing a solution that helps unlock the needs of more products in the future, we are not planning to deliver a Unity in-house Real-time GI solution in the 2021 release cycle.

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Thanks for reading. As ever, we appreciate your feedback and hope that this answers your questions. You can add further feedback or post questions in the comment thread for this post, and our team will be on-hand to answer.

Unity Lighting Team

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I am happy that Enlighten GI real time is available again. is an essential resource for most games. so it’s a very welcome feature.:smile:

Still, it’s a little disappointing…:frowning: I expected some announcement of a possible alternative solution to real-time lighting on Unity. Okay, that was not in the plans for 2021. But is it possible that this native solution will arrive by 2023? it would be really interesting to know more about it…:eyes:

Still, thanks for sharing your plans, now I can better organize our team here…:wink:

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Hi! Thanks for the info!

But what have you been working on all this time since you’d deprecated Enlighten?

Have you come up with any replacement for Enlighten real-time GI (except RTGI) and if yes, where is it now and what’s gone wrong?

Do you have any plans regarding real-time GI for the near future apart from Enlighten maintenance?

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Thanks for making it available to URP!
One question about the GPU PLM, is Radeon Denoiser still planned to come to the Mac version of unity?

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Doesn’t the Intel one work on macs? From my limited testing it’s much better than the Radeon Denoiser.

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Thanks for the flow charts! It really helps.
Maybe you could tell the other teams that have compatibility issues that they should do the same.
Then set up all the flow charts together on a page somewhere.

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Thanks for the update. Committing to support this through 2024 gives a lot of peace of mind. Nice to see that I have a path forward to keeping Realtime GI in my project while always remaining on a supported Unity version. We just won’t speak anymore about the “dark” times between 2020.1 and 2021.2, where Enlighten was missing from HDRP. :slight_smile:

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Why do I advise you to use Enlighten to bake lightmaps?

  1. Enlighten is too fast for the first bake time compare to the Progressive CPU
  2. Enlighten is more faster when changing light settings (no needs to rebake the scene after changing light settings)
  3. No preparing time
  4. No crash

Tips:

  1. Disable final gather
  2. Use very-low lightmap parameters
    The result is a bit noisy for interior white surfaces (non textured)

My Q8400 old cpu can bake below scene in 1-2 minutes and 30 seconds when changing light settings for the next time:

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Very happy about the news of URP and HDRP getting Real-time Global Illumination in the form of Enlighten for the foreseeable future! :smile:

However, I still would totally love to know more about Unity’s in-house RT GI solution, and how that fits into the grand puzzle. Obviously we’re not getting Unity’s RT GI anytime soon… But would it be reasonable to hope for previews of it in the 2022.x release cycle?

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It stinks this won’t be included in the current release. We need real time gi for our game, but upgrading to 2021.2 will potentially break all of our plugins we have purchased.

But I am also glad it will be available in our development cycle for our current game.

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I’m wondering why there is nothing about the ProbeVolume in this update. Is it still an experimental feature so you don’t want to mention it here? From the GitHub comments and updates it looks like you are using and working on this feature heavily. Probe Volumes are metioned int HDRP 11 / 2021.1 release notes. As far as I remember they were also ported to URP from HDRP some time ago.

Allowing runtime baking/rebaking of whole Probe Volumes or just sections of them would cover much more use-cases than Enlighten or ‘editor-only’ ProbeVolumes which require editor baking. It still won’t cover realtime scene changes (destruction, realtime building etc.) but at least it would cover procedurally generated scenes (as the probe volumes could be baked in runtime after the generation is done). Procedurally generated scenes are very common these days so it’s a very common use case.

TLDR: If you plan to introduce Probe Volumes it would be nice to expose some methods for baking/rebaking/updating them in the runtime and not only in the editor.

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Hi, thanks for the update. This is great news. However, I’m confused about the decision to continue labelling Enlighten as deprecated, especially with the reasoning that PLM is better for baked GI. For devs using real-time GI, wouldn’t the deprecated solution be the only working one for a few years? Continuing to label it as deprecated even when improving platform reach, adding more SRP support etc seems to be a bit confusing too.

Of course, this is a minor point but I’m afraid that this might cause confusion in new devs, especially since the new real-time solution wouldn’t be out for quite some time.

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We are currently working on determining the right path forward for our in-house RTGI solution. When we are ready we will share our plans with you.

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For clarity, we are leaving the deprecated label only on Enlighten baking (as it is currently). Enlighten real-time GI will not be labeled as deprecated.

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What is the status of DDGI for HDRP?

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I hope this doesn’t mean Unity’s RTGI wont be ready until 2024.

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Good question and well spotted! :slight_smile:

Probe Volumes are still in the R&D phase and they will likely get their own post in due course. :slight_smile:

This update is somewhat orthogonal to that feature. Our intention was to keep it focused on the timeline of the various backends for baked GI and real-time GI.

Feedback received, thank you!

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Hi Onigiri, HDRP DDGI/RTXGI support is not part of our roadmap for 2021 release cycle.

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Hey Lars!

We’re investigating the feasibility of supporting the Radeon Denoiser on Mac, both on Intel processors and on Apple silicon. We’ll share more once we can.

The Intel Denoiser (OIDN) has received speed and quality updates recently. We’re expecting that this will help as well!

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Is Skinned Mesh support being added? It was said It was in the backlog a few years ago. This would be a useful feature for HDRP.

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