Lighting Box 2 Next-Gen Lighting Solution

Progressive is always better but needs long time to bake with less noise.
Enlighten is good for faster bake with UE style

 

Are you planning to release your findings in another kit?

 

I plan to offer three products:
1. Outdoor sample scene
2. Unity Paris sample scene
3. WebGL lighting sample
Each one has own lighting box with optimized settings

About current work (Unity Paris):
* Dropped Realtime lighting mode (because has much lighting leaks)
* Optimized baked mode settings to achieve the best quality in fastest baking time (less than 10 hours for big scene)

 

WebGL

 

That pre-post to after-post comparison is a massive difference. Makes me wonder how it would look with non-baked objects. In my experience you tend to get a bigger disparity between baked and non-baked components when more post is used. Have you considered dropping Ethan or some other standard asset into those scenes to show how suitable your setup is for games versus visualisations?

Edit: obviously your exterior vehicle scenes already do this.

 

I'm watching this with great interest. My lighting attempts always lead to bland looking scenes so I'm hoping to learn a lot from these products. Keep up the great work.

 

Can hardly believe you're releasing this for free. It's easily AAA quality stuff.

 

@Adam-Bailey I already shown that the main difference between Unreal-Cry and unity just was Post Effects. Cry and Unreal used post effects by default so when you working on light settings, you don't know what is your actual light settings in action.
So i decided to make post effect profiles based on my experiences to make unity lighting similar to other engines. I Already played AAA games for about 10 years. So i can setup post effect settings similar to Unreal and Cry engine that's made by developers with more than 10 years industry experience.

without post effects, Unreal lighting is just similar to a simple game engine:







And unity with post effects:

 

Lighting box is already free (download from first post for outdoor). I just want to sell my demo scenes and models

 

Considering the city outside this apartment is actual geometry, would it be possible to have a light-setup similar to the one found in this image, but with the city outside not being that bright?

 

Forget other game engines:

 

This demo was from evermotion (i'm not sure) and background city was a city wallpaper on curved geometry
You can light your city image in photoshop
Also you can use combination of a image and actual 3d building models

 

Probably but lets not forget that UE4 can automatically provide almost twice the frame rate on scenes with similar setups without you having to tweak with any settings at all. FPS being a major obstacle in gaming.I thought I'd mention it to play fair with UE4.

 

With changing a simple settings, you can get 2-3x more fps on unity too. Unreal used common optimizing solutions by default. You can do same thing(even more) in unity too.
For example:
When you have switched from High SSR to Low SSR, without noticeable quality changes, fps always become 2x more than before
Or by activating Occlusion Culling, you can get 60FPS instead of 40 fps.
Or with changing shadow quality, fps going up to 2-3x
All of these settings are automatically applied in UE.
And there are more optimization ways in unity from different guys. because unity structure is more easy to understand and edit
Per layer camera clipping
different billboard systems on asset store
Different optimized effects and shaders

But nothing is automatic in unity! You must first learn and then use them! It's better for you. My scene was 20 fps on my first test in 1080p resolution. But its now solid 60fps with higher quality.

More fps in UE are just rumors that are compared by newcomers

 

That last image is your best so far - on this forum at least. The nature shots in the following post are even more impressive. I'll download Lighting Box tonight and give it a go. Great work!

 

The last image is precomputed realtime or PLM?

 

PLM
PLM need huge amount of RAM to bake trees. I can bake ~100 tree with 32gb memory

 

Current Lighting Box is just for outdoor scenes. New one will be available soon for interior scenes on asset store
The main difference is on post effect and camera settings

 

How did you resolve the tree baking issue from this post? These look like SpeedTrees.

 

Used double sided standard shader. Then you can activate double sided GI in standard shader inspector (unity5.6.1p4+)
Also you can use 0 Backface Tolerance. It's makes some light leaks on other object on terrain
Don't forget to change manually terrain lightmap parameters in its inspector

 

My experience is that is that unreal also conserve lighting data with normal map, while unity flatten it with baked light that roll over the high frequency details.

 

Baked normal was good for mobile games and also was available in unity 4. for next gen games unity offers precomputed realtime GI with Directional lightmap mode. You cannot use baked normal maps on realtime solutions. But for mobiles, that was great in unity 4.

 

Is there a solution for realtime render in this quality output? im focusing realtime render with dynamic objects and static objects. I have caught the quality on average in several tests.

I have not found a working solution to the indirect shadow problem in dynamic objects (using light probe).

https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/c...oft-shadow-fake-indirect.478096/#post-3116317

In the way you show (180 degree spotlightfrom outside), unfortunately you can get it with static bake.

I guess an asset that creates fake indirect shadow (like capsule shadows in unreal) using lightprobe will solve the problem. I give feedback to developers do it if possible.

 

Did you tried fast shadow projector assets? for example:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/14746

 

People used to say that last year too when Unity didn't even support dynamic batching yet, for instance, and UE4 had it for a long time. When I pointed it out they pretented Unity could compensate through 3rd party plugins lol. Just take a look at the release notes for the latest versions of UE4 and you'll find there a pletoria of similar optimizations, like monocular vision and automatic LOD generation for static meshes, that Unity has yet to catch up with. Plugins can probably help fill the gap but they will never be as good as inbuilt ones and will always leave me in fear of them breaking after an upgrade or get abandoned by their authors. They are generally quite clunky and don't always perform as advertised. You mentioned the use of billboard systems for instance but can you actually mention just one that has been updated within the past 12 months?

In all comparisons I've seen up till now UE4's rendering quality were cleary better than that of Unity so those claims remain to be verified. Have you done any benchmarks before? If so I'd love to see the results. Else you might want to have a look at this comparison to get an idea already:

Notice how the framerate almost doubles as the detail in the scene increases especially at the end of the video. I really don't think the author forgot to activate occlusion culling in Unity else the FPS would have been much lower in Unity at the beginning. Camera clipping and billboards are not applicable here since all visible objects are relatively close to the camera. Also the UE4 rendering is clearly more natural the quality settings could not have been reduced to ramp up the FPS. If you would like find out for yourself on your machine then you can always do so by buying the asset for both engines from the links in the description. Here's another video that seems to point in the same direction: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kgzt35darIs

Was this video posted by a newby?: www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzCxWJxsskA
The commenters there who said they struggled with Unity performance probably haven't figured out yet that a OC switch exists in Unity and shadow/SSR settings too. Or they probably didn't want to bother doing necessary adjustments and would rather learn everything all over again. Whichever it is if you have anything to backup your claims then you're more than welcome share it with us.

Btw have you noticed how Unity shadow bias makes small edged objects, like drawer/cupboard handles, seem like floating in mid air when they're actually touching? The edge of kitchen table in the comparison video(youtu.be/mBfMDlpZRz0?t=2m27s) doesn't have any shadow underneath, to give us those cues, while that in UE4 has it and it got even better this year with the introduction of "contact shadows". Recucing the shadow bias kind of worked but also caused flat surfaces to "self shadow" in my scene so I had to leave it as it is. AO helped quite a bit but that didn't eliminate the unatural floating effect. Does anyone have any workaround for it?

 

As I said before, unity performance problem was SSR in all comparisons. In first part of the video unity fps was higher than UE. In second part of the video UE fps was higher than unity. Did you know why?
As I said before , unity SSR is the most performance killer. It's activated in Interior section of the house because smoothness surfaces.
You can see fps difference in below screen shots:
http://imgur.com/a/rVxJ0

Also that video was from unity old post effects (when it was in beta). You can get a lot better quality and performance from new Post Processing Stack effects than before.

And finally see my old test with maxed out unity settings with Realtime GI, Very high shadow quality, far distance shadows, 6 million triangles without Occlusion culling(i'm not sure),with true volumetric lights(killzone style) in 1080p resolution on GTX 960


I know all UE optimizations are automatic. But when you have using my lighting box and set editor settings based on my documentation tips, you can get even better performance compares to most AAA next gen games.

The biggest problem in UE is always gameplay. Just search about UE games gameplay on youtube and see even all AAA games has very dry and repetitive gameplay. even all camera movements are dry. But when you have looking on Unity or frostbite games, all gameplay elements always are smooth and enjoyable . It's power of the unity and i want to help peoples to solve unity graphics problem to make him insure about creating enjoyable and unique gameplays with AAA graphics (Lighting)
Unreal always has good graphics without any knowledge . Enjoy it and leave unity for its own fans . I just want to help unity fans. I cannot work with UE ,Max and Cry engine. Because Maya and Unity editors and structures are best in the world.

Don't forget that just all UE demos are beautiful models, textures and particles

Oh i have forget about other performance tips on UE. Just change unity's camera FOV from 60 to 40 and then see how performance increased and scene looks like more to UE!!!

 

Check NGSS on asset store for contact shadows in both forward and deferred

 

Unity was realtime and unreal lighting was baked.

 

WebGL

 

Both was baked. But Unreal FOV is less than unity by default. So we have :
1. Less poly counts and screen pixels (affected on all image effects performance )
2. More cinematic view and more impressiveness
I found it on this week. It was one of my most important discoveries in unreal
Less Fov = More cinematic look = better performance

 

A good solution for everyone that who want to create a super optimized next gen game :



Solution:
Always use webgl optimized effects on next gen platforms

 

* Fixed saving problem
* Removed tonemapping script

A video from a guy using lighting box:

What is secret behind realistic renders?
1. Less FOV (43 for example)
2. Blue color in color correction
3. High resolutions on game view tab (top left) only possible on Unity

 

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/7075


Now see on lighting box:

 

50fps 1080P on GTX980ti in UE
my demo ~50fps 1080P GTX 960(half power of the 980ti) in Unity (Realtime GI + Volumetric Lights)
I will make a clone scene if i had free time

Unity

 

Hi cong.wonderfull

Is it possible to use a mobile device?

 

Thank you
No, dx11 only (or OpenGL 4)

 

Mobile game

 

Amazing pictures when considering the whole thread! I didn't even know that this kind of quality can be created with Unity.

I am pretty much hobbyist with Unity and I am mostly using Unity for outdoor visualizations (flying camera animations). Therefore, I would like to ask that what is/are the main reasons why vegetation (especially grass) looks much better in UE? At least I have not seen anything in Unity that would be close to vegetation/grass quality in UE. Is this because some limitations in Unity or some other reasons?

 

The difference is on grass models and textures.UE demo is made by a very powerful artist. Just watch related topic from author.https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?107852-Environment-WIP-Forever

Unity has different grass solutions. I just tested one of techniques (Simple models)

 

My old grass demos was 3d grass models. Now i have tested unity terrain system grass:

 

Share this project with a sample scene. Excellent work.

 

All assets from unity lighting demo:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/73563
Grass has been painted in unity terrain component. It's very very very very much optimized compare to speed tree 3d grass mesh

Watch video :

Easily make your own grass texture:

 

4K Render In Editor