Question Looking for guidance from Unity on HDRP + Realtime GI

All this talk of removing GI without, as yet, after years, having much more than a reference to them "researching it" (2020.2 docs) and yet having removed it already in the latest releases makes me think Unity is chasing Unreal Engines static model, which would be disastrous since Unreal are infinitely better at handling a workflow, the only thing keeping me from jumping ship now is that it's tight as hell and I use compute and like to iterate on unique designs, solutions that others don't seem to be pursuing, so Unreal is a no go cookie cutter for that sort of thing, but it dawns on me that the next thing on the chopping block, particularly after all this malarky with the ill conceived Shader Graph which pretty much wrecks aspirations for hands on shader programmers like myself, will be Compute, something that Unreal won't expose officially just like Godot, while in the latter case I'm sure it's cross compatibility, target demo and support overhead but in Unreals case it's because _it's already in use thank you very much, hands off_, I'm starting to fear Unity will do the same thing and I'll have wasted years of my life learning this wonderful system only to have it's entry points entirely cemented shut. Prove me wrong with some evidence that you're actually replacing the realtime GI, i mean cmon, static lights? what flavourless hell is this?

 

No worries brother, I'm with ya! Same as many other devs.
I believe Unity will provide real-time GI soon. Also - if you don't need it right away - RTX is coming to the rescue

 

No

 

After reading more on this I can see the position you guys are probably in, I had no idea Enlighten was such a big deal, but I guess Unity signed a long contract with them back when it was cheap or something and now for the price the new company likely wants, given you're an engine provider that lacks Fortnite money but has a 1000 strong team, you'd prefer something that truly rocks and that you'd have total control over, but also given the performance and technical requirements on top of multiple pipelines it's turned out to be an extremely big task. Good luck! Providing a dev blog on this would be cool though and make everyone developing dynamic content, in one of the only engines you really can do that in, a lot happier.

 

I would really like to see Unity get beyond needing anything baked (although I do work on stuff that can't have baked lighting so...)
Godot getting realtime GI, Unity is developing RTX raytracing which is good to a degree (only a section of PC owners).
Maybe it is too early tech-wise but would like to see all lighting effects available real time in HDRP and scalable from lower-end to movie/screenshot high-end!

 

That's very interesting to hear, but given the lack of support, I wouldn't dare to use it. Interesting, though.

But the more I thought about it, the less it makes sense to me. How does the license allow Unity to release versions that have support for Enlighten, without having explicit support for Enlighten? I was under the impression that the license did not allow Unity to release new version of HDRP that included Enlighten support, and yet here is Unity 2020, with Enlighten support. Is there some very specific license that allows you to release new versions of HDRP that have support for Enlighten, as long as you don't modify certain parts of the code that uses Enlighten?

I don't think I'm alone in saying that the loss of official support for Enlighten has been a huge pain. It means I'm stuck with HDRP 7 and Unity 2019.3, even though there are several engine and HDRP improvements I would definitely want in my project, if it didn't mean giving up official support for Enlighten in my project. Now, based on your statement, it feels like the lack of official support for Enlighten in 2020+ HDRP project was arbitrary rather than a strict requirement of the license.

Anyway, to put it specifically: Unity's license with Enlighten apparently allows it to release 2020 versions of Unity with HDRP support and unofficial Enlighten support. What is preventing Unity from making that making that Enlighten support official?

 

If they would still support it, they would have to address the all the bugs related to Enlighten which are now marked as "Won't fix"*. So they can spare the cost of fixing these bugs and put more ressources into RTX.
Personally, I would not bet any longer on supporting Enlighten. You just can look forward to a new lighting solution if you targeting the new SRP.

* https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/is...y-mode-when-baked-and-realtime-gi-are-enabled