UE4 gpu lightmap baker??
polycounter lvl 10
Found out about this:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/development-discussion/rendering/1460002-luoshuang-s-gpulightmass
Anyone tried this out?
https://forums.unrealengine.com/development-discussion/rendering/1460002-luoshuang-s-gpulightmass
Anyone tried this out?
Replies
Good thing I keep mental ray around since it still has the option to bruteforce lightmaps using gpu rendering.
@JordanN Haha!! I can imagine the wonder why the lightmass baking isn't faster.
Wait.. u can use Mental ray to bake lightmaps in ue4?
Although this feature only works with older 3DS Max since Autodesk dropped Mental Ray in newer versions.
That said, there's nothing stopping you from using 3rd party plugins to get around these issues. That's something I wish I tried more earlier.
Enlighten
Beast
Those are the ones I know from the top of my head. All the others ones are done outside the engine (i.e Mental Ray, Cycles, Vray etc). Or you can try another game engine which has more 3rd party support (Unity).
Lightmass still seems like the better choice since it's designed to work with assets and real time reflections/specularity. Using external lightmap would be a problem to set up for every asset, let alone if changes are made to assets or materials.
The gpu lightmass baker is very fast. I will just have to deal with the light leaks till that is solved by the developer. It's still in its early stages. Hopefully it's looked into in the not too distant future.
Octane is working towards something like this gpu lightmass baker.
http://developer.download.nvidia.com/NsightVisualStudio/2.2/Documentation/UserGuide/HTML/Content/Timeout_Detection_Recovery.htm
I can't find the nsight monitor icon. Does this come with Geoforce Experience ap? I don't install geoforce experience due to how slow it was. I install only the driver.
Or is it a separate app entirely?
EDIT: Nevermind. Problem solved. :- )
Edit: just found this vid from the devs that is only 2 months old:
What of tiling textures? Since it bakes everything to the diffuse with shadows and gi to one map. Does that mean I have to use very high res textures? It would be cool if one can bake out the shadows and GI separately and combine them with diffuse and reflection in unreal?
But what of bake reflection captures in ue4? can't one use this to bake reflection captures with the imported external lightmap?
You still have screen space reflections, but they are a poor substitute.
Or you could look into Enlighten https://80.lv/articles/dynamic-reflections-with-enlightendynamic-reflections-with-enlighten/
I was able to solve the lighting issue but I have had to remove the geometry for the wall panels and carvings as this requires the lightmaps going up to 4k and increasing volumetric lightmass settings to high settings to capture the panels. I had to resort to normal maps which isn't the best archviz wise:
Would have loved the silhouette and shadows. There are also lots of light leaks and artifacts due to the panel geometry on the walls.
Any comments on the external lightmap images I posted? The reflection capture I baked seems to hold up quite well. Using external lightmaps might save time though cumbersome rather than spending weeks trying to fight to get light leaks and shadow issues sorted.
@musahidan Have u use external lightmaps with ue4 before?
Datasmith is still beta, but it's basically a one-click Vray/Corona entire scene to UE4(Unreal Studio)
Also, check out this script for Max(useful for lightmap UVs) http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/steamroller
This might also be worth checking out
Edit: sorry I've assumed you're using Max throughout this thread. Are you?
No, I am presently using Blender atm. My apologies, I should have mentioned that. I am also familiar with 3dsmax but I am using Blender atm.
Thanks for the video link.
Out of curiosity, why are you using Blender over Max for Arch-vis?
@musahidan I am using a game engine for rendering archviz and Blender has been getting a lot of cool features and its free. It handles the job well. There is already a great feature coming called eevee and autodesk have been stalling with each new release. That doesn't mean I don't use 3dsmax anymore. At least, Blender does the job for now and no need to pay subscriptions. They are just tools tbh. The end result is what matters :- )
I was more wondering about the layout side of things. I haven't tested Blender on large or complex scenes with lots of elements, but Max is certainly king of the hill when it comes to that.
I wouldn't exactly say that Max devs are stalling. I'm on the beta and the future is bright. Subscription prices are a bit of a joke though. blame corporate for that. Max devs themselves are doing great work. But hey, you can't beat free.
Just a lighting test.
I do intend to go back to 3dsmax at some point but right now Blender is killing it.
I see a lot of animators and archviz guys using it to get renderings out quickly. No need for unreal engine except u are creating interactive content
The rig they used was pretty insane, although with some help from Moore's law and the inevitable optimisations I could still see real-time ray-tracing eventually replacing baked solutions in the next 2 or 3 years.
They promised to get their Brigade engine down from using 8 GPU's to just 2 (at perfect 30fps) by September of this year. That's a huge increase in efficiency while looking identical to their Octane software.
It's also not just GPU power. Advancements in AI technology will also significantly speed up renders.
I've been using a path tracer software that recently shipped with AI Denoising and it has helped cut down on rendering time that would normally takes hours to almost near minutes of having a crisp high resolution image.
The current/next wave of Nvidia GPUs are going to ship with Tensor cores which are specifically optimized for AI calculations. Unfortunately, I do not have this card yet but from videos you can find online, the gap in real time ray tracing is nearly diminished.
Of course, how this tech is used for games is a different story. VFX/TV Studios will want to use it because they can brute force anything they want. Arch Viz will use it because it could attract more customers to see photoreal mockups. For games, it might be a PC developer who hops on the technology first and delivers another Crysis. Even if the spec requirements are heavy at first, every other developer will look at this and be like "we want this stuff too!" and it will be a race to getting ray tracing running on every platform.
Lighting test Blender eevee:
No lightmaps or light leaks!! Ue4 why aren't they using light probes?
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Engine/Rendering/LightingAndShadows/IndirectLightingCache
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Engine/Rendering/LightingAndShadows/VolumetricLightmaps
Unity has light probes too:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/LightProbes.html
I don't know if its dynamic, or pre calculated, like unreal's one. Like its describen in the Unity docs, light probes stores lighting information about empty spaces (in the air basically). It has a very grid-like nature, and you store some color, and intensity (guess) at each point. As the movable object passes through the points, the lighting value is sampled from the nearest points, and interpolates to the next one as the object moves and approaches the points. This is the "point sampled" method of indirect light cache, and it would give you a uniform value across the whole actor. You can change it to be purely interpolated, and then all nearby points would count and would be interpolated, so its not uniform. Useful for the indirect lighting of movable objects in a baked lighting scenario, but not really useful for static objects.
My issue with ue4 is it requires lightmaps, with uvs set up for it. With Blender eevee, this is not the case, I simply added a irradiance volume and it calculated the indirect lighting and the calculation is fast. U can also tweak the volume settings as well as specify the probe size and number contained in the volume, what I am hoping in future is the ability to move each probe within the volume to better areas that need lighting or probes that are caught inside geometry.
I heard the Book of the dead demo by Unity used light probes for dynamic assets in the scene but I think there is more to the tech. The truth is if u can grasp how lighting works, u can create very realistic scenes with limited rendering features. only downside is the amount of work to achieve the desired look.
if your goal is to work in a game studio, instead of looking for fancy tech to try and solve your problems with renders, learn how to troubleshoot lightmaps and how lighting works in game engines. Look at ashley mckenzie or harley wilsons artstations for some nice lighitng work inside ue4.
https://www.artstation.com/noisecheck
https://www.artstation.com/harleywilson
If your goal is to work in games, I would try and construct a portfolio that is relevant to actual in game work being done in studios now and for the next few years as this console generation still moves forward
I am an architectural visualizer and I am interested in tech that will enable rendering that is efficient and faster. Right now the archviz field is looking at using realtime tech due to some of the shortfalls and expensive cost of offline renderers especially for animations. Our workflow is quite different from games especially with textures, polycount, geometry and lightmap resolutions. Moreso, time is money. It isn't ideal to be spending valuable time struggling with light leaks or lighting issues especially in this field.
There are already works been done with the eevee engine. Like I said, I am not writing unreal engine off yet. If archviz artists can use a realtime viewport to chun out high quality work, that would be helpful and faster.
However, using eevee is similar to ue4 in a lot of ways, as the workflow are kind of similar. I think a lot of artists here use diferent game engines in their place of work. Understanding the main concept of game engines and how they work is transferrable :- )
Where I reside, there aren't any mainstream game studios here, I am not even sure if there are any tbh. If an opportunity arises, that would be pretty cool though :- )
Further lighting refinement (wip):
But, of course, baked lighting is still going to be around for many more years to cater to lower spec medium.
ah ok totally makes sense, I was assuming you were making game art stuff. I totally agree realtime archvis is gonna be massive in the coming years. here are a couple dope videos you can use for a good benchmark. I remember seeing some dude who was making paid tutorials for this stuff in unreal and they looked geat. edit: found it! https://3dw.mykajabi.com/ - think hes got a youtube channel with some free content as well.
U can check out this guys's work:
If I am correct, he is the one who sparked the use of unreal for archviz work and got a lot of archviz companies interested in the tech with his high quality work..
Sun shadows aren't accurate when doing an opengl render. It's accurate in viewport though