Official Enlighten deprecation and replacement solution

I think #2 nails it.

My own two cents, for whatever its worth: ask yourselves how many professional programs you own that have decided to massively update almost every single system at the same time, with no real ETA on when any of them would be 100% fully feature complete and polished. There's a reason for that. And no, I do not buy the whole "but each team is independent and working on overhauling a billion systems in parallel doesn't actually make things harder." Not when I was straight out told by that marketing guy that they didn't have the finances to hire anyone to answer any questions from paying subscription customers, which I've never heard from a company before. Which means they are clearly understaffed, at least in certain areas. Which leads me to believe they don't actually have the appropriate resources to throw at every single task they start.

Which, surprise surprise, would logically lead to 100 things taking forever, having bugs, or just being left once they reach "good enough".

Unity, at this point, feels like a program trying to do way more at once then it should be. I love the stuff they're implementing ... but I kind of wish they would actually make each feature feel finished and polished before showing me 100 new features they're moving on to instead.

 

But then there is the fact that they have about 2500 devs according to recent news...which makes me think WTF is going on?

 

So one user pointed out that they changed the official product roadmap I just got shocked that Realtime GI was completely removed. It was under the category "Planned", so in other words "We will deliver". But now it's not even in the category "Under consideration". So does this mean a full and better replacement will not come for HDRP?
I'm not able to find my former comment and voting on this. Because I also got invited for an e-mail survey by Unity.

Realtime GI is still in URP roadmap, not sure why no longer on HDRP?

 

It can probably still come, but in terms of usability, it might not, due to the DXR in HDRP ...

This is the future after all, RayTracing... I believe that unity does not want to waste time creating something that in 1 or 2 years time will be in great disuse (remember that HDRP is focused on high-fidelity graphics) high-end consoles like PS4, PS5, X BOX series X and S, and modern PC... only for those who want to develop for these platforms will want to use HDRP.

So it makes sense for unity to develop a non-RayTracing alternative to URP, which is focused on weaker hardware, like Mobile and Swith.

 

We have all learned from the past that the Unity roadmap says nothing about the true state of development.
I agree with you that far too few resources are put into the roadmap, but I'm pretty sure they are still working on it.
If you take a closer look at the preview version of HDRP, you will find that Probe-Volumes are optimized in almost every update.

Now guess what GI technique is used for this picture (No, its not enlighten nor ProgressiveLightmapper)


And as you can see. They also have other construction sites.
For example, SSR will get a decent update with Temporal Accumulation in the future.

So take your time to check regularly the Github repo, come up with constructive feedback, and be a little patient with the guys as they are working on a completely new render pipeline to implement things that will take its time to do right.

Cheers!

 

Could you please elaborate on their current state?
Though, probe volumes are unlikely to become a true dynamic GI. Update them or not, you won't be able to rebake them instantly and in runtime to follow changing lighting conditions.

Well...probe volumes? Looks cool, but spheres are the worst candidates to demonstrate GI, since they would look great even with some regular lightprobes.

If you're talking about the one that has already landed in HDRP 10, then the accumulation is too slow and noisy (even with TAA) to be considered production-ready, unfortunately. I hope, it will be dramatically improved in the near future.

 

Interesting take, but I can't help feeling such a plan is grossly incompetent at this point in time since we are no where near the level of hardware required to make raytracing GI a reality for the majority of users, let alone how long before we might see it implemented!

Simply put not even the latest generation of consoles appear capable enough to pull this off ( at least when enabling other RT features ) without compromising on resolution or framerate or both, at least without nvidia's DLSS ( is that even natively supported for Unity games? ) At best I'd argue we are a whole console generation away ( so at least 5-6 years ) and while PC might be a little closer that will only be for a small proportion of games ( steam survey suggests maybe 12-15% at most own a RTX 2000 + card ).

I think we are currently in the transition phase for raytracing in general, but it's a phase that is going to take at least 5 years before a developer could even begin to assume their target market has or will have capable hardware. In the meantime every game released is going to rely on a combination of techniques or simply offer two different rendering paths. Neither of which is going to work if HDRP is DXR only ( is that even supported on PS5? )

Now i'd admit there are some nuances to this. Raytracing GI is already a thing, and on its own it wouldn't necessarily require the latest hardware, though a DXR only version probably would ( see AMD's issues with their newest gpus ). Even so its still going to be a high end hardware solution, which leads to the other problem, compatibility. With Unity's shift to provide two mutually exclusive rendering paths ( at least at runtime ) a developer can no longer cover all or most of their market and having this weird GI split is only going to make things worse.

The only thing I can think of at the moment is that Unity are really positioning HDRP as some future tech, something that you could maybe start using now for your AAA game to be released in 5-7 years, when hardware will have caught up. That feels like quite a risk to me though, just look at how bad Cyberpunk is performing on last gen and to a lesser extent older PC hardware. Further more its pretty obvious that in 5 years time the decisions made now will likely be outdated anyway as graphics is still quite a fast paced evolution of techniques and concepts.

 

It looks like UE4s Lumen will be released long before there's even a proof of life from Unity in regards to realtime GI and they (Epic) said Lumen does not even require Ray Tracing hardware.

Considering the very slow adoption rate of RTX (as Noisecrime pointed out with the Steam survey) the intended primary use of Unity's SSGI seems to be more blog posts with pretty looking cars for the foreseeable future.

 

Still no news? Not even after all this complaint?

At least have the decency to come out and say something.

 

First we don't hear about Realtime GI since pretty much the moment this post was written more than a year ago (despite it being promised in 2021.1 which is already in alpha), then it gets removed from the HDRP roadmap without any announcement or blog/forum post, and now the Graphics GitHub repo is getting closed without any information. I don't know what Unity's strategy regarding rendering is, but it doesn't seem to work in our favor.

Heck, I just don't even know what Unity's strategy regarding *Unity* is supposed to be anymore. Between all those packages never being released and all those announcements going nowhere, it seems like the only thing going forward in Unity at this time is paid packages for professionals working in non-gaming related fields.
I'm not an Unreal fan by any means, but if Epic manages to make UE5 more indie friendly, I think we'll see loads of indies and hobbyists dropping Unity altogether.

 

Yeaa exactly. Their communication is gone and if you get an answer its usually "yeaa, the X team is working on it". Working on what? Realtime GI? When we can expect results or anything really? Then it's silence. Specular lightmapper is gone since Unity 5.5, they promised better one. It has been like 5 years and there's no built-in alternative. Now it seems like it's the same situation with Realtime GI. It's disappointing

 

Bump

 

Realtime GI is far better pipeline than baked stuff.
Much more easy to manage for small studios, no huge baking times and less resource hungry, less video ram needed on end user machines.
I have the feeling that the Unity team has put too much meat on the fire, and all that meat is now burning... meanwhile Godot proceeds...
It's a pity, but it seems Unity is making mistakes... for too many consecutive years.

 

Dev's have no requirement to write here if they don't want to, and my guess is if in general UT isn't talking anywhere about this, no dev wants to get involved, saying something that they can't really be held to. I suspect when things get to a point where no one has responded for ages, and we _actually care_, that's when its least likely anyone will actually speak up.

What we really need is more transparency in terms of real feedback as a company policy, but ... heh. I'll let someone else fight for that one.

 

I recently saw a HDRP Enlighten implementation branch on SRP repo, but I've not checked what was that.

 

They have indeed reenabled realtime enlighten in that version. So it is tempting to think that the plan has changed. But I dont know.

I havent tried it because that branch is based on the 12.x version of HDRP for 2021.2, and also because its been so long since I used enlighten that I'm not the right person to test it.

 

( For context: https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/compare/HDRP/enlighten-support & https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/commit/a6e092f89630d2380d8e6fe63d6981d2fc5dc9ec )

 

Hmm. Why just HDRP though?

 

I don't know... Maybe that "real-time GI replacement solution" got delayed as elbows suggested?

It's worth noting that Enlighten Realtime got re-enabled, not the Enlighten Lightmapper (which is still deprecated).

 

So in the 2021.1 beta announcement there's no mention of the new realtime GI, is this intended? If so, very disappointing.

https://blogs.unity3d.com/2021/01/27/unity-2021-1-beta-is-available-for-feedback/

 

Okay, this is weird. i did not expect the unity to reactivate him. (technically not yet active, it's just a pull)

still, if it is to be added again, why not in the URP? why in HDRP? and why only now? what happened to the internal implementation? so many questions now.

 

First of all, enlighten is not real-time GI. Enlighten does not support dynamic geomeries. It just was supported dynamic Lighting.
Second , There is no real-time GI running at the low end.
I also want to buy a private airplane that is priced at a car.
The above examples are not real-time GI and cannot be used in DOTS.
And DDGI is made exactly like that. RTX and RTXGI(aka DDGI) are different.

Third, If you use ProbeVolume bake mode well, it can be used as a low-end GI. ( But It belong HDRP )
ProbeVolume is dynamically manageable and it's SH can be swapped.
ProboeVolume is feature of HDRP , but maybe similar method could be used.

Even on high-end devices, dynamic GI is not an easy story.

If Unreal, Sparse LPV and SSGI should work fine on current devices.


It's the same way as a shadows.


SS is in charge of the very precise part and any distant part, and the other parts is used voxelGI or LPV will be the way to implement real-time GI in the future.

 

Is it possible to rebake/update whole ProbeVolume or just part of it in the runtime in the current implementation?

 

Hi,

Will it be a general post about the future of GI in Unity or just an update about Enlighten support?

Thanks

 

smart move, there would be no way to have feature parity with the Built-in rendering pipeline without Enlighten.

 

I had already thought of that. The new RT-GI implementation didn't even come as a preview. Even removing it without a replacement would not be in the interests of Unit's new 2021 strategy. That Unity never said anything was probably due to ongoing negotiations.

 

Whilst I’d like to see the fine details of this announcement before making a full judgement this seems like a great move on Unity’s part.

It’s just such a shame it’s taken so many years to get to a decision that should have been made at the outset to ensure the widest possible support for upgrading from built-in to the new SRPs. Knowing that Enlighten was to maintain supported in the new SRPs for N number of years would have made the decision to invest in switching rendering paths so much easier, even if SRPs didn’t or still don’t necessarily have full feature parity with built-in.

Very much looking forward to reading this blog post.

 

So will this be available in Unity 2020 when the final release comes out? We are on 2020 and would like to stick with the final version, but we also really need Real-time GI. And bringing Enlighten back would fix that. I just hope it will be in 2020 not just exclusive to 2021.

 

That's great news! Can't wait to hear more about this.

 

Enlighten lightmap baker was too much faster than progressive...
progressive is just good for interior lighting and find proper light settings for baking