[Official] 5.0 - Feedback request for Global Illumination

Who are you?
Nick Konstantoglou, Lead Artist at www.kickback-studios.com

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
Would rather not talk about our next game. It's realistic looking.

How does Global Illumination fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
Before Unity 5.0 was into the picture, I was going to use a lot of high density/high quality lightmapping to get the result I wanted. The art style is really dependant on the lighting looking good.

What are the GOOD things about Global Illumination that you like?
Dynamic GI looks really cool and it works. Opens up new possibilities. I have a variety of scenes that have night/day versions. I think now I can just save a variety of different lighting setups and use the same scene for both day/night (maybe make a cool transition as well), that's amazing.

What are the BAD things about Global Illumination that you dislike?
There will be some scenes though that don't require dynamic GI (or at least not much). From that respect the new system is worse than Beast. What it's doing is more complex of course, but it takes really too much time. The baked GI being upscaled precompute GI doesn't help. It feels like I have this really high resolution static lightmaps, only I'm filling them with low res, upscaled, data.

Bringing the precompute resolution to be as high as I want (say, 20, on a somehat big scene) the baked resolution to be is not possible (precompute will just take FOREVER). High density static lightmaps, where every pixel counts, on bigger than small scenes, seems to be really hard to impossible right now.

I'm also not sure about the "Advanced parameters" being a preset thing. I used to manually set the "Scale in Lightmap" per objects. It seems if I want that level of fine grained detail with enlighten I need to use a ton of presets (kind of defeating the purpose of presets). On the other hand I haven't played with it on a real production scene, so maybe making 10 or so presets will be good enough.

How can we make it BETTER?
More speed is always welcome. A better workflow for baked only would be cool (I remember a dev said something about looking into implementing final gather for the baked GI, that would be cool).

Do you like the Global Illumination workflow?
In general, it's ok. I think I mentioned my issues in the previous questions.

How do you spend most of your time working with our Global Illumination features? Anything bogging you down?
Precompute taking that long! I know what it does is complex, but it's a bummer when all I want from it in the end are static lightmaps! Other than that and of course excluding a variety of bugs I'm experiencing (which I assume will be fixed) I think it's fine. More docs! You added "Important GI" for example, but I'm not sure what it does (and it could potentially be really cool).

When you learned to use our Global Illumination, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?
It has been fairly easy. All the problems I had were solved by reading more on the forums and experimenting. Really good docs would have saved me from any hurdles I may have had.

 

Who are you?
Solo indie game developer

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
A first person shooter

How does Global Illumination fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
In my opinion GI is a need in most games. Without it, lighting looks flat and it has been a standard since a long time ago. Enlighten does allow it to be more dynamic, however scenes still need to be static which is expected since full dynamic GI with good performance is still not gonna happen for a while.

What are the GOOD things about Global Illumination that you like?
I like the realtime GI, the simplicity, the iterative baking and the seamless integration with other features like PBS, reflection probes, etc...

What are the BAD things about Global Illumination that you dislike?
How can we make it BETTER?
First, in the deferred shading pipeline, GI is rendered on the geometry pass which makes things like screen-space decals impossible. GI should be rendered as a light. I know GI needs information about the meshes and that it's tricky if not impossible but the way it is right now is very inconvenient.

Second, there is no exclusion options in Enlighten, we can't bake lighting for an object and exclude it from the GI calculations (this would be useful for alpha blended objects for example)

Third, there's no dual lightmap support like in Beast. Dual lightmaps allowed things like cheap and high quality long distance shadows, alpha blended objects with baked shadows (combined with realtime shadows)

This version of Unity seems to fight against any kind of properly lit alpha blended tech (can't do properly lit screen-space decals, alpha blended objects with baked shadows mixed with realtime lighting, etc...). The only improvement was alpha blended objects casting shadows and they flicker all over the place which is no good.
Properly lit alpha blending is something that has been around for ages (baked/static) and it's a shame such an advanced engine like this cannot do it at all.

Do you like the Global Illumination workflow?
Yes, iterative baking and the ability to change lighting instantly is awesome, however, everytime you move an object, the scene needs to be baked again which takes way longer than Beast took and you could bake specific objects

When you learned to use our Global Illumination, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?
Pretty easy to learn and intuitive

 

Who are you?
-Gökhan Özcan working for www.simgesimulation.com

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
-Games, simulations and archviz

How does Global Illumination fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
-I really liked that. I have always been complained about lack of graphics about unity. With the help of GI, I can achieve better lighting and better graphics.

What are the GOOD things about Global Illumination that you like?
-Real time responses

What are the BAD things about Global Illumination that you dislike?
-I am not sure if it is a bug or not. I am working on interior room arch viz project, there are some walls which does not have any texture on it(just dark albedo color) and when I bake the scene, walls has some discolors. U can see them when u simulate 4 walls room and bake the scene.

-We really need area lights. It is hard to understand why unity still does not support it.

How can we make it BETTER?
-Area lights, area lights, area lights...

Do you like the Global Illumination workflow?
-Mostly


How do you spend most of your time working with our Global Illumination features? Anything bogging you down?
-Directional light is not enough for indoor scenes. So I have to deal with so many emissive materials. Position them,rebake them, look the result...

 

Who are you?
Developer in the process of registering a business.

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
Two games: Puzzle and 3rd-person platformer

How does Global Illumination fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
Graphics are huge in these games as we're going for an artistic style and form.

What are the GOOD things about Global Illumination that you like?
Produces nice lighting, a bit better than Beast did, but comparable.

What are the BAD things about Global Illumination that you dislike?
Speed. The realtime iteration is nice, but as it takes a lot of time with larger scenes and terrains, it can cause some issues at times, especially if you don't have too much ram on your dev system. The most issues with this involve the time it takes and that mans you sometimes have to wait for it to complete before hitting play(otherwise, it pauses on play).

How can we make it BETTER?
Speed is the biggest thing. Beast was about the same with speed, some instances faster, some instances slower. But baking a huge scene like we are doing takes ages of time, slowing the process. I see in the videos it's quick to bake with demonstrations, but in actual systems that devs are using, the bake time is a lot slower.

Do you like the Global Illumination workflow?
Yes, it's great and works well, simple to learn.

How do you spend most of your time working with our Global Illumination features? Anything bogging you down?
Nothing bogging me down other than time, it works well.

When you learned to use our Global Illumination, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?
Nope. Easy.

 

My name is Kashif Riley and I am an artist.

I am working on a fighting game that will make use of natural and realistic lighting.

I was an avid user of Beast, and though it looked marvelous for the time, it was a major time sink for baking lighting into my scenes. Especially with use of IBL.

I love that I can tweak my lighting in my scene and have near instant feedback. LOVE IT LOVE IT LOVE IT!! I can't wait to see what will come next for the updates. And I love that it is dynamic too.

The only things I can point out are things like scale of the object, such as I have a tiny sphere, and it lights up the entire room. It may be a shader thing. I will have to test it some more. And speed. Got have speed.

Right now, it is suiting my purposes. I would love more control with IBL.

Love it. It is super easy to use.

Just the fact i have to use presets to get the look I want.

Nothing stumped me about it. I caught on instantly and was glad I don't have to use Beast anymore.

 

Who are you?
Paolo Surricchio, graphics programmer at http://www.camposanto.com/ working on http://www.firewatchgame.com/

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
Firewatch. Geometry wise, an open world game set in the Wyoming wilderness

How does Global Illumination fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
Right now we are not using the new lightmapping features since we are not using lightmapping at all. Given our geometry and the nature of the world, we found out that an IBL solution fit our needs the best.
Although that, I have some feedback regarding the API part of the Global Illumination part of unity 5.

What are the GOOD things about Global Illumination that you like?
Honestly, the tech is certainly impressive. Real time GI for static geometry. Fantastic.

What are the BAD things about Global Illumination that you dislike?
2 main things:
- the tech is too "closed" for me to use it without knowing what the real cost and how the process works; I have almost no access to the API, I have no idea, apart from the texture size, what the memory and performance implications are. There is no support for streaming and the data structure that holds the light transport graph (the one created during the Clustering phase) is too hidden for me to work with (streaming? new scene comes in? delete old one?).
- I cannot stress enough how little the API allows me, as a programmer, to work with it. Example: I wanted to simply use the Unity sky baking feature and generate SH coefficients for probes given different skies. Can I do that without using the entire GI workflow? No. I'd like to build a library around the SH class that unity 5 introduced. Can I? No, because the class is an empty container for floats, it doesn't do much more.
This boils down to a more modular approach to the lighting API. That would be the biggest "Bad thing" I have.

How can we make it BETTER?
Answered this above.

Do you like the Global Illumination workflow?
Since we are not using it in production, I don't think my opinion is worth on this

How do you spend most of your time working with our Global Illumination features? Anything bogging you down?
API problem stated above.

When you learned to use our Global Illumination, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?
API problem stated above.

 

Who are you?
A hobbyist.

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
A Flight simulator.

How does Global Illumination fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
I plan to use GI mainly on terrain (baked) and inside the cockpit (realtime).

What are the GOOD things about Global Illumination that you like?
-Fast once pre-compute is done.
-Looks nice.

What are the BAD things about Global Illumination that you dislike?
-Very slow to pre-compute, especially for higher detail settings. No support for CUDA et. al.
-Baked shadows look terrible when the default settings are used.
-Shadows in general seems to be a bit of a black art in relation to GI. Is it even "supported", or is it just a "side effect" which happens to be there?
-Does not work on terrain (yet?).
-Does not work with transparent materials (yet).
-Only works with static objects while a cockpit of a vehicle would qualify as "static" in terms of GI as well, this is not supported.
-Doesn't handle incorrect UV's well. Even if an object is textured correctly, it has a hard time figuring out what the correct lightmapping UV's are. This results in visible seams or just totally black triangles.
-Console errors are common.
-SpeedTree objects look totally differently lit than other objects.
-Looks different with each new beta release. At some point the "look" has to be locked down.
-Progress bar text is still hard to read:


How can we make it BETTER?
-Would be nice if it included baked SSAO.
-Support for non-static objects, which as far as GI is concerned are static (such as a cockpit), is a must. The only way to get that to work currently is to make the cockpit static and move the world around it, which is a nasty hack.

Do you like the Global Illumination workflow?
-Yes, very easy to use.

How do you spend most of your time working with our Global Illumination features? Anything bogging you down?
-Just the pre-computation time is bogging me down.

When you learned to use our Global Illumination, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?
-Pretty shallow learning curve. It pretty much works out of the box, as long as it is able to decipher the UV's.

 

Who are you?
Daniel Pots, Techical Director @ VR Bits

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
We're developing DarkfieldVR, and Oculus Rift space combat game

How does Global Illumination fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
I use realtime GI for Laserfire and Thrusterparticles affecting geometry with indirect light and baked GI for a nicley shadowed and lit asteroid field.

What are the GOOD things about Global Illumination that you like?
It's fast when it's correctly configured, your support in Forums is very fast, looking forwards to path tracing preview . I also love that it's much easier now to let realtime and baked light work together. Before It was a hassle with beast and dual lightmaps.

What are the BAD things about Global Illumination that you dislike?
Baked GI should be bakeable per-Prefab to use it in dynamic objects: I have a special case with the inside of a cockpit lit itself with emission textures on displays and buttons. This should be bakeable on dynamic objects as well because the lightsources are always moving relative to the cockpit geometry.
Maybe a prebake or runtime bake when level loading of to-be-instantiated geometry is a good idea. Another idea I could think of is that bake data is stored in the prefab directly.
Also the overall documentation is currently very fragmented. There are infos in the forum, in unity and in the docs.

How can we make it BETTER?
I think pretty much everything is said before. Ask me again in a few months when I discovered and understand everything .

Do you like the Global Illumination workflow?
Yes, althought I currently don't use the iterative workflow because it's always baking from the beginning when I play and stop the scene.

How do you spend most of your time working with our Global Illumination features? Anything bogging you down?
I don't quite understand the emission texture working together with baked or realtime GI. The results are sometimes very strange.

When you learned to use our Global Illumination, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?
The "Lighting" and "Lightmap Parameter Settings" and how they work together are not very good documented. With b14 the tooltips got better, but a little bit more in-depth knowledge would be appreciated alongside with the "Baked, Realtime and Mixed" Settings of light.

 

Who are you?
Studio for Architecture Presentations

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
Architecture Presentations

How does Global Illumination fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
We often have large scale City Presentations with lowpoly buildings for the city and a "highpoly"-main object.
Until know we baked shadows/AO in VRay. Our clients love the ability to rotate the sun and have realtime shadows.
So I am now very happy that we now get even a realtime GI-System.

What are the GOOD things about Global Illumination that you like?
Once static GI is baked the scenes look much more lovely.
The interaction between a rotating sun and the light reflected by geometry is very nice.
Also the diffuse sky-lighting is working fine, while HDR-lighting seems too weak to me:
In VRay we can light a scene with a spherical hdr, in Unity we only get a weak albedo tint.
In summary I would expect some more dramatic impact coming from the hdr in Unity.

What are the BAD things about Global Illumination that you dislike?
The extremely long baking time of GI makes it completely useless for us, even for very lowpoly environments.

How can we make it BETTER?
First, simply make it faster. Much faster.
Give us more control on baking parameters, make GI controllable per object.
Let us see and manipulate how and where GI is stored.

Do you like the Global Illumination workflow?
Yes.

How do you spend most of your time working with our Global Illumination features? Anything bogging you down?
Read blogs, watch Tutorials.
Waiting for GI to bake on a simple primitive scene (floorplane, sphere, box).

When you learned to use our Global Illumination, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?
The way realtime ambient light is calculated (I use the wonderful TimeOfDay-plugin) is not visible or clear to me.
(Realtime-) Reflection probes are not very intuitive to me. Still testing around.

 

Who are you?
Matthieu, Developer at http://www.methodinthemadness.eu/

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
Architecture visualizer and House configurator.

How does Global Illumination fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
The aim is to produce realistic visualisation of interiors with dynamic objects, lighting and materials. The environment is created dynamically (As an example, walls are created on the fly on runtime) there is no precomputed data except furniture prefabs (mesh and materials). Compute time is not a problem for such project.

What are the GOOD things about Global Illumination that you like?
The actual Global Illumination provides a good and very easy to learn workflow and satisfying controls for static scenes. The computing is quite fast depending of your hardware and your scene and gives the artists very fast feedbacks. The dynamic lighting and materials are quite nicely handled. Really great work for static or semi-dynamic scenes.

What are the BAD things about Global Illumination that you dislike?
The actual Global Illumination could be considered as an evolution of the old lightmapping system but it's not truly dynamic and realtime.
As pointed out by @PaoloS the technology is also too much closed there's almost no access to the API. You cannot generate anything using code even with compute time, you cannot access to lighting data, I don't even know how and where it is stored.
It's too much static and not adapted for dynamic scenes even if Geomerics claims that their engine supports dynamic geometry and environment.
Here is a resum of my opinion of the actual Global Illumination system : MaT.'s post

How can we make it BETTER?
Make it dynamic, make it accessible and open during runtime through code even with compute time to process lighting.

Do you like the Global Illumination workflow?
From what I have tested it is a nice and easy to learn workflow for static scenes, so yes.

How do you spend most of your time working with our Global Illumination features? Anything bogging you down?
No access during runtime through code and not as dynamic as it was claimed to be.

When you learned to use our Global Illumination, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?
From what I have tested it is very easy to learn.

 

Who are you?
Mark D - Games training company (I apologize if I am repeating other posts)

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
Most recognizable term I suppose is serious games and/or games for training.

How does Global Illumination fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
Every unity scene we build will use GI for our lighting

What are the GOOD things about Global Illumination that you like?
Enlighten so far is fast and since the last update is allowing me to create GI as good as beast, infact better, alot faster with less noise. The dynamic updates for sliders and getting real time results for lighting is fantastic for the designers.

What are the BAD things about Global Illumination that you dislike?
No ability to bake states of GI. For example, tween from one set of baked data to another. (Going through a day or night cycle) I am happy that this wouldn't be real time generation of lightmap data, but at least if we can bake 1 or 2 + sets of data and have access to code to allow the possibility of fading from one to the other.
There is still a lot of bleed in small or shallow walls when using enlighten. Currently to fix this, I have to split a meshes to force it to have a different GI chart map - this helps avoid bleed on large objects such as floors and ceilings for the inside of buildings but its an extra step of modelling.
Reflection Probes/meshes - Being able to blend is great and being able to to turn off blend is great. What I feel is missing is the ability to choose which probes affect an object so that blending can be turned off for that one area. Also reflection probes tend not to bake correctly when using baked lighting (might be a bug)..... Lastly on the probes, its really difficult to align reflection probes so they don't blend. Bounds are difficult to adjust or snap to a neighboring probe bounds.
Being able to preview packed UV's without baking? Currently you have to set a resolution for lightmap and scale per object and only see the results after you bake. It would save a lot of time if we could make small tweaks to scale and see the resulting pack without having to bake.
Baked LOD's with enlighten is not working? (is this working as intended or a bug?) - Is light probes meant to replace this feature?
Bad "seams" on baked organic objects. Best example is a sphere. Other objects you can naturally find seams to create your 2nd uv's, but when something is inherently organic and round, with no natural seem its really difficult to get rid of it.
Terrains take an awful long time to bake in comparison to a scene without one.
There is no option to change lightmaps from linear to gamma. If you change the project to be one or the other, the light mapping tool does not recognize this and throws a warning that you are using the wrong type map. No way to fix that I am aware of......

How can we make it BETTER?
Have the ability to bake states of lightmap data and tween between them.
The ability to multi edit/view bounds for reflection probes - or be able to deselect probes per mesh
Preview packed UVs
Option to bake LOD's like beast
Speed up terrain baking.
Ambient occlusion colour tint?
Would like higher slider options for for ambient intensity, indirect intensity and bounce boost.

Do you like the Global Illumination workflow?
Yes - its a lot better than beast.

How do you spend most of your time working with our Global Illumination features? Anything bogging you down?
Terrain baking.
Reflection probes not baking correctly when not using real time (think it might be a bug)
Scenes sometimes stop having the ability to use continuous baking, throws up errors - probably a bug.
Ambient occlusion changes seem to take longer than expected to bake when adjusting the max distance.

When you learned to use our Global Illumination, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?
I found it all relatively easy, but I have been using unity beast for and other render engines for quite some time

I know my post might sound negative, but I am pleased with the enhancements so far, so keep up the good work and am happy to give more feedback if needed!

 

I'm not in a position where I can give a full review yet as I've only played around with it a little bit...

One thing I can say is updated documentation would be very helpful, so the developers testing your beta can get up to speed quickly. If we were developing instead of asking questions on the forum, you guys would also crush bugs much faster.

It's obviously a beta and subject to change, but I think even if someone from Unity who is familiar with the system took 30 minutes to quickly update the documentation it would save a lot of developer time.

It'd be great if the docs had a last-updated timestamp (like "updated for beta 16 on 10/10/2014") so I can know if the documentation I'm reading is up to date.

At the very least, it would be great if the "known issues" and "known limitations" on the Global Illumination Quickstart page in the beta documentation was kept up to date, so we're not trying to solve problems and do things that simply aren't possible yet.

 

WIll do!

 

Who are you?
Francisco Hermida, independent developer.

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
Architectural visualization apps

How does Global Illumination fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
For interiors scenes and exteriors, we need to make the scenes look as close as possible to the quality of rendered CGIs.
I use it for tablets and desktop apps.

What are the GOOD things about Global Illumination that you like?
I like the dynamic technology and the idea of having both dynamic and backed lightmaps at the same time.

What are the BAD things about Global Illumination that you dislike?
I don't think that the workflow to import custom lightmaps is good enough, I have to create and maintain scripts on both 3ds max and unity for it to work.
Another problem that I couldn't find a solution is a way to break group of objects in specific sets of lightmaps inside unity, imagine I have a red floor and a white box on top of it, I want to bake the lighting of the box but not of the floor, but I still want the floor to be affect the box's lightmap.

How can we make it BETTER?
Mainly I want unity to expand the GI options from internal baking and dynamic, to include custom imported lightmaps. It's possible to import lightmaps from 3dsmax + vray for example, but it's not as smooth as it could be. Would be great if we could integrate the lighting probes with the custom lightmaps.

What I normally have to do is to manage groups of objects per lightmaps while working on 3ds max. Then I have to create a metadata for the exported models (including each group of objects), so when I import in unity I can auto apply the lightmap on the related objects. I would prefer that Unity included a lightmap per group of objects workflow instead of having it per scene. If this is not possible, then create an option that allow you to reference other scenes to be used during the baking process to affect the lighting of the current scene.

There should be a easy way to have different light conditions per groups of objects, I don't want a one button bake all for all cases, I want to bake only one group of objects and it's respective lightmap using the predefined lighting condition.

Another suggestion is to somehow improve the problem with light leaks trying to take advantage from pre defined navigable areas that takes priority during the baking stages, so you don't have the light leaking from behind the wall to the visible geometry area. The idea is to have the light on most cases leaking from the visible area to the occluded area. Of course this can be fixed by having proper models, but in my case I normally import architectural scenes from BIM softwares, and it comes with a lot of unnecessary polygons.
This is already possible to do in 3ds max, for example, I create a volume that defines a area that I predict my camera will navigate, then I generate points on this volume and for each point I do spherical incremental irradiance map calculation. After I have the final irradiance map I render the lightmaps with reduced amount of light leaks. The problem is that I can't see a way to take advantage of this technique when using the dynamic GI on unity.

If possible I would like to have the lightmaps associated with prefabs of group of objects, so when we export it or move from project to project it comes with either the dynamic lightmap data or the baked texture maps. For example, I want to render lightmaps on a powerful computer and then move these prefabs or packages to another computer with a different project.

Following the other suggestions it would be great if we could swap lightmap data from either baked or dynamic for each group of objects (maybe this idea would work only for baked lightmaps), this way you could swap from low res to high res in order to control the amount of GI data on the memory and on the case of baked LMs we could have day and night lightmaps.

It's important for me to have full control over how many objects are included in each lightmap, the unwrapping should be compatible with this workflow.

Don't limit the sky ambient light intensity to 0 - 1.0 , make it like 0 - 100.0 if possible.

I don't have any idea if this is possible, but would be great if we could have both lightmaps and baked shadowmap, and the chance to compose both in one texture, or even keep it separated in two different set of textures as an option so GI is lowres and shadow map is in a different resolution.

Last idea is that we could have lightmaps per models like a barrel or a chair or table, each with it's independent high resolution lightmap, then later depending on the scene situation you can create some sort of lightmap atlas that combine these independent lightmaps, this way you can reuse the original highres lightmap for different situations without using all the memory available. This would be some sort of manual texture streaming. You could also bake one or more models at one time, and tweak the settings to give the results you want per object.

Do you like the Global Illumination workflow?
I think it is too simplistic if you compare to the workflow you can find on CG softwares. I'm not saying that Unity should do everything 3ds max does, but it sure can have a better or similar workflow to manage lightmaps and it's respective group of objects. There are also features like override material for GI purpose, generate lightmaps for only the selected objects, GI settings per light, per object, global overrides, that can be useful for many situations.

How do you spend most of your time working with our Global Illumination features? Anything bogging you down?
I spend most of my time trying to fix light leaks. Since the internal baking process is not as flexible as you can find on CG softwares I can't use it for all cases, then I lose time trying to import theses custom lightmaps. By doing that I lose access to other features that are only available if you use internal baking process.

When you learned to use our Global Illumination, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?
Importing custom lightmaps to unity and loading the lightmaps per group of objects.

 

Who are you?
Lead developer at www.cadtouch.com

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
It's not a game but an architectural CAD application.

How does Global Illumination fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
We aim to archive photorealistic views for editing in real time. We have a 80% of user created geometry, dynamic meshes generated in game.

What are the GOOD things about Global Illumination that you like?
It dynamically updates lightmaps when lights change ingame.

What are the BAD things about Global Illumination that you dislike?
It won't update the lightmap dynamically if any geometry moves ingame. Lightprobes only capture a median light value spread over the surface.

How can we make it BETTER?
It would be nice if we could have the Enlighten engine ingame in it's whole form so we can launch a bake ingame when geometry is changed deeply (of course not in real time).

Do you like the Global Illumination workflow?
Yes, but I would automate light probes placement.

How do you spend most of your time working with our Global Illumination features? Anything bogging you down?
Placing light probes is a trial end error procedure.

When you learned to use our Global Illumination, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?
It's easy to learn.

 

Who are you?
Austin! I am an indie game developer with 6 years of experience. I do everything from scripting to audio to modeling

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
3D MMORPG, fantasy medieval etc.

How does Global Illumination fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
Lighting is very important for every game. It really allows me to control the area's mood. A dark forest needs to look like a creepy dark forest, and a sunny meadow needs to look like one too.

What are the GOOD things about Global Illumination that you like?
I love how it's realtime. I love how incredible it looks, and love how it's pretty simple.

What are the BAD things about Global Illumination that you dislike?
Light probes are terrible. They are actually super effective, but I mean terrible as in placing them. Placing them is a nightmare. They need to be automatic or have a grid option AT LEAST to start with. It's just frustrating.

Next... it's bug city. There's a lot of problems with it that are being patched up, I just want to make sure they are ALL patched up before release.

Next... It's WAY too slow in certain situations. Baking terrains larger than 1000x1000 or so is IMPOSSIBLE at the moment. Even baking small 100% flat and white terrains takes ages, when a plane that size is way faster. Bugs & Speed are HUGE issues right now.

If light probes were less frustrating/automatic and all the bugs are fixed and light mapping becomes faster and works on terrain, I don't think there's anything bad about the GI. It's really incredible when it works.

How can we make it BETTER?
Beyond what I mentioned in the last question.... Perhaps a button in reflection probes that is "Always Update" outside of the editor as well? Perhaps Update every # of frames when a camera is within distance of? It's minor as this can be done with scripting. Very unimportant really.

Skyboxes could be better. I'm not impressed with the skybox system at all. It would be SO USEFUL is skyboxes could be rotated.... simply an x&y offset input. You could do some incredible stuff with that.

Better baking speed and light probes which i mentioned before... but just repeating it.

Do you like the Global Illumination workflow?
It's pretty good when it works.

How do you spend most of your time working with our Global Illumination features? Anything bogging you down?
The terrain NEVER working... the baking speed.... the bugs... Oh the bugs...!

When you learned to use our Global Illumination, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?
Making emissive materials update color/intensity in realtime was confusing for me. Why not add a "Update when color/intensity changes in realtime" checkbox somewhere... Not sure if it can be done.

It's pretty quick to learn... but it was still slightly confusing at first.



Thanks guys for reading. Amazing job on all of this, it's incredible!!! Just fix the bugs.

 

Who are you?
Engine QA and Scene-Artist support for Auran/NV3 Australia/Europe

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
Simulator 3D, Outdoor & Landscape

How does Global Illumination fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
It would fit many requirements.

What are the GOOD things about Global Illumination that you like?
Impement of Geometrics Enlighten is great.

What are the BAD things about Global Illumination that you dislike?

* Realtime GI (1pix) : Time consumption and never ending jobs. So impossible usement currently on large scenes.
+ Bad timesharing between user control interface and CPU usage. User interface hangs on low(default) anyway.
* Baked GI (10pix) : Not used.
* A lot of main bugs on simple scenes using with/without some textured cubes and one directional light.
eg: No shadows on all/most? z facing planes.
* No area lights

How can we make it BETTER?
+ Need 4 Speed 4 GI CUDA support
+ Bug fixing
+ Implemention of Area Lighs for enlighten.
+ Delivering tutorials for proper setups on different scene requirements on enlighten.

Generally:
+ Enlighten-Bake-Network feature. Bake a scene on multiple computer systems.
+ An Enlighten-Render-Bake online service.
+ Area-Render-Baking. Defining areas for baking and cobining them for finalizing.
+ Dynamic-Area-Loading support for large scene areas. (Like Amplify for Material/Texture does)

Hint:
Use Realtime-Resolution 0.3 for speed up a bit.

Technote:
http://www.geomerics.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/CUDA_and_Dynamic_Lighting_Geomerics.pdf

 

There have been a few assumptions about wether the pre calculations are using the GPU (CUDA) or not, but from what I recall it actually is. Not all GPU compute work is done with CUDA, and for a cross platform engine like Unity they'd be using OpenCL anyway.

 

They said CUDA is not yet supported, but will be in 5.x [hopefully]

 

one thing i would personally like for a general improvement to the lighting is the ability to bake AO and use it with the real-time GI. currently it doesn't look like that's possible. this would really help mask the lack of detail in the real-time GI and would make a huge visual difference. also please fix the glitches with baked lighting(eg: no shadows from dynamic objects, errors in mapping, etc...).

 

Why would you like dynamic objects cast baked shadows ?

 

He means having dynamic shadows mix properly with baked shadows (instead of just being sort of added on top)

 

After playing around with it a little, on an i7 5960x with 16gb ram...

User interface needs more feedback during bake. Just something to tell us that it's still working and it's not locked up. I'll wait however long it takes, if there is an indication and visual feedback that it's working. But i'm not going to wait 30 minutes when it looks like it's stuck.

Show a percentage for each step or some visual indicator so we know it's actually doing something. If it's stuck on light transport job 400 for an hour without any visual indication that it's still doing something, i'm going to give up on it.

Editor responsiveness - it's pretty hard to use the editor when it's doing GI precompute. It's not really an iterative workflow when the editor locks up on and off.


the "Global Illumination Quickstart" beta documentation is due for an update. Even if it's just a documentation on the Lighting window user interface. The documentation is still from like beta 9 or something; the user interface and some of the terminology has changed. Please update the beta documentation so developers can properly test...

 

Who are you?

Just an independent developer

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?

An RPG. Yes, I know they're complicated and take forever. yes, I've done it before.

How does Global Illumination fit into that? What use-cases do you have?

It would make the lighting a bit more realistic, but honestly wouldn't have that much effect.

What are the GOOD things about Global Illumination that you like?

Looks pretty

What are the BAD things about Global Illumination that you dislike?

Way too slow to bake. I've actually never been able to bake successfully. Even at the lowest of low settings, that have been modified to be 4 times lower than the lowest of low. The longest I've waited for a 500x500 terrain to bake is 48 hours, and gave up.

How can we make it BETTER?

Make it so it can bake in 5 minutes, like Beast could. Make it so we can mix realtime shadows and light maps. Or maybe just include the option to bake with Beast if we want.

Do you like the Global Illumination workflow?

I would if it worked. But it doesn't except for the most simplest of scenes.

How do you spend most of your time working with our Global Illumination features? Anything bogging you down?

Yes, the baking does not work. Gets stuck forever on terrains. Never gets past 2/11 layout systems, even on a 500x500 terrain with a height map resolution of 1025. Please fix this. Process the terrain in chunks or something. discard things from calculations that don't effect those chunks. If you want to look at the scene, it's case number 658208.

When you learned to use our Global Illumination, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?

Using the reflection probes wasn't very intuitive. Didn't work until I baked it. Plus, some stuff was still black reflections. it's an alpha, so them's the breaks, I understand.

 

We also have this use case. Currently we're doing it in Unity 4.x, but would also do it with 5.x if we could. The reason is that our art style is defined by high-fidelity lighting, much higher than realtime GI can provide, and we've gotten many compliments on it, including a feature about in gaming press, despite being unreleased. Our style also means we only need lightmaps as textures, and vertex colors for the rest. So adding another set of lightmaps in specific situations is not a big deal. Furthermore, the newer mobile devices that aren't top-of-the-line tend to have much more memory than they do processing power, such as OUYA's Tegra3. So trading texture memory for processing power is a wise move.

 

Morning guys... I just made an interesting discovery in my GI testing... I mentioned a few times about colour bleed and I have managed to get it working ... just make sure you have luminous polygons set to realtime GI and your lights set to either mixed or baked. It will be nice to get this colour bleed baked into a light map but you are forced to use the luminous polygons to make the bleed possible.

 

Hi there,

I won't be doing the answer thingy, since this is a very specific question.
I'll be doing it sometime in the future, since i have a few things to ask.

Anyway, my question is ( I'm not sure if it's already possible, but i couldn't find any info on that):
Is it at all possible for two ( or more ) different meshes to share the same lightmap space?
This is a big issue in my game because it features destruction.

For example, here's an image of a small building:


And if i poke a hole in it:


You can see that the colors don't match up. The interior side of the wall is even worse, since everything else is much darker.

These two meshes already share the same material and same UV coordinates, but it would be perfect if they could share the same lightmap through those UV coordinates. The destroyed wall is also disabled until it is needed, meaning the lightmapper won't be able to use it...

Is that already possible to do? if it is, then how? if not, is it something that could be added in the future?

Thanks


EDIT:
For example, if we have an object, and if we specify that object to use another object's lightmap, it would be perfect.


EDIT2:
Actually it seems it's already possible to do this...
The objects that are "destroyed" also need to be activated and both objects ( normal and destroyed ) need to have the "Auto UV Max Distance" smaller than normal.
I did a few tests, and seems to be working properly.


Although i can still see some very small artifacts, it works for the most part.

I'll also have to make a script that enables/disables every destroyed mesh when i want to bake the lightmap data.

EDIT3:
But, it would be better if we could assign an object to another object so it could use the same lightmap data. Would make things much simpler. ( i think )

 

You COULD try using light probes, but that would require the area where the damage is to be marked as not static.

 

I updated my post at the same time you posted

Using lightprobes won't work, since the color will actually be different from the lightmapped objects:


I tried many settings, but none worked well.

But like i said, i found out how to do it ( on my edited post )

 

Who are you?
I am Radiant Silver Labs, small one man studio trying to build an open world adventure FPS game.

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
It's kind of like Vice City, that level of world and people, a populated city with indoor bars etc.

How does Global Illumination fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
I've assumed GI can simply make all of my scenes looks cooler with lights glowing their own colour and bouncing etc.

What are the GOOD things about Global Illumination that you like?
Small tests look unbelievably good, no complaints there.

What are the BAD things about Global Illumination that you dislike?
Not ever got my scene to finish computing to see GI in its glory! PC Churned for literally 4 weeks and still no complete results!! Something seriously is wrong, I think in console you should output what is going on more, because I am sure some weird mesh or something is causing issues (my scene is basic and cubic and around 30 meg) . I have definitely seen parts of my scene working with some nice GI but I have never yet made it to the end of a bake to truly see what is really happening. This happens even with a tenth of my scene turned on. Even with one tenth of the level most times my pc hd churns so hard the mouse and keyboard stop responding, then the screen, then the pc is dead, for hours upon hours, you get a brief 10 second reflex when the GC clears and it starts a new cycle but never long enough to untick "continous baking", resulting in the need to power down the pc, this cycle repeats for around 18 days for me so far. Never once reaching an end. I do get closer each time!!..

How can we make it BETTER?
Preferably there would be no phase that locks me out of my own computer, slow is ok, but most times I am totally locked out (in the phase after light transport 7/11, I cannot recall AAAOA or something). My theory on this is that I use my ssd for virtual memory and that it draws and releases it so quick (requires 56 gig for a simple scene?)that somehow that takes over the cpu, but it is so bad I cannot even move the mouse for 45 minutes, and even then I get about 5 seconds - I mean the pc becomes a completely unresponsible beast, with hd thrashing aplenty, not unlike a 286 trying to rotate a jpeg this goes on FOREVER until I reboot (I consider that if I didnt need to use this PC *eventually* it would complete its task in a few weeks).
Ultimately, I find the baking process currently totally unusable. For my relatively basic scene, weeks and weeks of pain went into the baking, and with no actual results. I had to give up, lower resolutions resulted in yet more weeks of pain and no results. I regard the current baking process as completely broken as of Beta22, it could not and refused not to bake a very basic and cubic scene, so I hope its improved in the new release But I am assuming some objects in my scene are really causing an issue. As I say a message in the console explaining any bad (or good!) items would be welcomed I am almost certain I have somehow done something really dumb in the old days that I've lost/forgorren now and is giving me grief, otherwise the forums would be wild with GI doesnt work claims.

Do you like the Global Illumination workflow?

Actually love it when it works (on small scenes yes perfect, I salute you, so yes it works), apart from when you load up it takes ages to load all the precomputed data, and the cache is huge. Having not completed a bake i wonder about these sizes and load times in game too.

How do you spend most of your time working with our Global Illumination features? Anything bogging you down?

Not ever having being able to complete a full bake makes me wait until lighting is "ready" before wasting another month of my life trying to bake and spending every 12 hours rebooting my pcs. I can say the entire game dev cycle was upset by the new lighting stuff (and the radical new shader), and its still taking a while to get back on track but I feel ultimately it will be worth it to have such a killer lighting system.

When you learned to use our Global Illumination, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?

I found it fine, nothing stumped me, in small scenes it works and you can play but when you introduce it to a new large scene its weeks of pain for no results as I can see yet, I know it will be gorgeous once it computes

Thanks for taking the time to provide your feedback to help us make 5.0 even better!

I Love Unity, it's the best piece of software on the planet. I mean that.

Gaz
Radiant Silver Labs

 

Who are you?
Technical Artist

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
Both mobile games end High end games, also realtime cinematics.

How does Global Illumination fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
Simply makes things look better.

What are the GOOD things about Global Illumination that you like?
I like the ability to tweak the bounce power after it's baked with no recalculation

What are the BAD things about Global Illumination that you dislike?
It just doesn't work... I mean yes it does work in a very small scene but as soon as you go bigger the bake time is insane. I have a simple scene with buildings that are basically cubes and set my baked resolution to 2 and it still takes hours to bake...

For the higher end games I tried the realtime mode, so after it finished baking it was looking nice, but as soon as I left the scene and come back it starts to bake again! what is realtime with that?! also produce files wayyyy to big, simple scene with resolution of 20 gives me a lightmap file of 650mb... that's unacceptable.

How can we make it BETTER?
Simplify the workflow and options. right now it's really hard to understand what's the difference between the baking mode and bounce intensity on the lights and in the Lighting settings. Also what is used in any mode is not clear.

Do you like the Global Illumination workflow?
It's not incredibly bad, but it sure needs some fixes.

How do you spend most of your time working with our Global Illumination features? Anything bogging you down?
I mean I sure can do stuff quick but I'm trying to do it right and optimized.

When you learned to use our Global Illumination, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?
The lack of proper examples or documentation is not helping. Constantly getting errors and the baking time is also slowing down the learning curve.

 

Who are you?
• Technical Director of a small ArchViz company

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
• ArchViz and real time 3d configuration tools

How does Global Illumination fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
• Get Photoreal quality on all device (static lightmapped in most cases) , like V-Ray

What are the GOOD things about Global Illumination that you like?
• Being able to tweak after lightmapping (though not tested that feature a lot yet)

What are the BAD things about Global Illumination that you dislike?
• Tested till U5 rc1 and even with final gather, it's very long to bake ! (ok rc2 says it's faster...) for non-blochty static GI solutions compared to beast.
• Too much to tweak per object basis (no need in beast) to have a decent GI solution.
• No network rendering for large scale projects.
• Didn't manage to get package export (to put inside another u5 project) of a lightmapped level to work. (loses lightmap data connection)
• UV mapping (UV1/UV2) are now getting a pain .... since enligthen seems to rely a lot on mesh contiguity. (padding etc...)

How can we make it BETTER?
• Get it more robust (like beast).
• Get a tool or console message listing buggy objects (zero UV, overlapped UV2 etc..)
• Quite slow loading a "realtime GI lighted" level (like an exterior neighborhood with around 300 gameobjects and 1 texel per meter)
• Lightmap network rendering !
• Blend (in near realtime or realtime) between GI solutions :
> Day/night (different lightmaps arrays)
> "LOD lightmaps" : being able to stream higher res lightmap when near.
• Being able to visualize the cluster for each UV island onto the FINAL generated lightmaps
(sometimes easier to just fix in photoshop some small artefacts on .exr)
• Auto "Scale in Lightmap" size based on face/surface topology analysis (like small angular objects would get more texels than flat/coplanar ones....)
• Get SSR/Enlighten probes flexible and powerful reflection system on standard shader.
• More standard effect with GI (SSS, Translucence...) but i guess it's more in the post-effect topic.

Do you like the Global Illumination workflow?
• Could be better (faster) and mostly more robust (too blotchy and dark spots)

How do you spend most of your time working with our Global Illumination features? Anything bogging you down?
• Getting black objects sometimes in lightmapped version, although objects seem to have correct UV1 and UV2.

When you learned to use our Global Illumination, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?
• Coming from Vray world and Beast, it's not yet "mature" for static lighting.
• Continous baking is barely used.
• Have to deal with complicated local params (irradiance budget/quality, resolution) to optimize realtime GI.

I expect that Unity "5.1" will be mature enough for ArchViz.
Keep up the good work !

 

@KEngelstoft OK I will do that, thanks very much! Only issue is my project is huge.. Im talking probably 20 gigs (fair bit of junk not used I assume).. If I rar this and stick it somewhere on my webspace is that good enough for you guys to grab?

EDIT: Sorry just read the FAQ for reporting, I will try make a package of only this level, that should be considerably smaller.

 

Who are you?
Unity Engineer at a major financial institution and also an independent game developer

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?

Data visualizations, interactive architectural visualization, indie puzzle games

How does Global Illumination fit into that? What use-cases do you have?

Trying to achieve near photorealistic quality for the architectural visualizations. GI offers the ability to dramatically improve the lighting of the scenes.

What are the GOOD things about Global Illumination that you like?

When it works, it produces extremely good looking results.

What are the BAD things about Global Illumination that you dislike?

It almost never works. The baking process is a nightmare, taking hours, often failing and stalling with no warning, sometimes completing but then the build explodes afterwards. Complete lack of feedback on what's actually happening during the baking process.

Why does it stall during clustering, why does it stall during bake indirect lighting, why does it stall during light transport, what do these things mean, how do I know when problems occur, how do I know what is actually happening, how do I know if it's actually stalled or is just taking a long time, how do I change the scene or settings to get better performance, how do I change the scene or settings so that it will actually finish, how do I change the scenes or settings so it will actually build when it's done...

None of these things are clear... at all.

How can we make it BETTER?

Improve reliability, improve performance, increase the feedback so we understand what's going on and how to fix what we're doing to make it actually work.

Do you like the Global Illumination workflow?

It would be great if it actually worked reliably.

How do you spend most of your time working with our Global Illumination features? Anything bogging you down?

Most of the time is spent staring at the bar... wondering if it's making progress, wondering if it's actually going to finish.. wondering if it does finish whether the scene will work afterwards.

When you learned to use our Global Illumination, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?

Just the lack of understanding of what to change to improve performance and reliability.

 

Who are you?
Fulltime Unity based freelancer

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
Everything. I make stuff ranging from small throw away mobile games, to first person shooters, multimedia projects, kiosks, installations for museums, ArchViz, data apps, basically anything my clients ask for.

How does Global Illumination fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
Looking for that realtime photo-real experience. Especially for ArchViz work. But also for Oculus driven apps. My clients are more and more asking for "photo-real". Once I educate them we move forward.

What are the GOOD things about Global Illumination that you like?
Ease of getting realistic lighting, using the standard shader and the realtime GI. While maintaining frame rates.

What are the BAD things about Global Illumination that you dislike?
Too slow! No feedback at all. Which makes it very risky to do anything 11th hour during deadline pushes. Which even with best planning one still needs to sometimes push out that last bake. So with no (even guesstimate) indication of time given or whether or not the thing is still crunching numbers and not hung makes it very risky to rely on.

The GI implementation doesn't seem to be reliable for large (ish) scenes. Way to slow. My computer has been "rendering" for several hours as I write this. That is using 100% default settings in Unity. My scene is an "outdoor" scene with some mountain meshes and clouds. Nothing super complex.

Too slow and no documentation.

How can we make it BETTER?
Speed it up, or at least give feedback to the console about the whole process, make it a checkbox option if you don't want to spam people's consoles for basic bakes. But us pros need indication that things a moving along and some indication of time.

Documentation!

Docs for best practises, docs about best way to set up meshes, UV1 and UV2 etc etc.

Do you like the Global Illumination workflow?
Hard to tell. As it is too slow so very hard to experiment and to work out best case usage. But I do like the premise and look forward to it being robust. Please do not abandon it like Terrain tools etc. Unity needs to put a lot of effort into this.

How do you spend most of your time working with our Global Illumination features? Anything bogging you down?
Watching the progress bar. Wondering if I should force quit it and go back to Unity 4.

When you learned to use our Global Illumination, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?
No docs, slow bakes which make experimenting very hard. Still haven't learnt it so really can't comment.

Cheers.

 

Who are you?
I'm a freelance graphic designer mostly working on Unity.

What kind of game are you trying to build or would like to build?
I work on archi-visuals and few simpler apps.

How does Global Illumination fit into that? What use-cases do you have?
GI is a very important feature for archi-visuals: I actually bought my pro licence when you added beast on Unity 3.
Having it now able to be animated and adjusted in real time is a big improvement, especially with the new standard shader.

What are the GOOD things about Global Illumination that you like?
Good results and performances.
Ability to animate the sun and have real time GI.
GI exploiting lightprobes in real time.
Ability to change the skylight settings ingame.
Ability to change GI factor in real time.

What are the BAD things about Global Illumination that you dislike?
Heavy on the HD: a tool allowing the user to delete some useless data in the GI cache would be great. More than once I was in trouble because my HD was saturated.

Baking is long and mysterious: I have no idea what's going on during big steps like "light transport", don't know how much is remaining or if it is stuck. We seriously need more infos about these processes so we'd know how to optimise render times.

How can we make it BETTER?
We need some logs so we'd know how much time baking took, and so with each steps: with beast, there was a "last bake time" and it disappeared somehow while it should have been improved with infos like time for each step and lighting set-ups.

An approximate prediction of the render time would be great. It doesn't have to be precise, just to allow us not to fly blind any more. When render can take hours, trial and error isn't an option.

Custom lighting pre-sets: I usually do some draft baking during the day when I'm experimenting or integrating new assets. I have to put the production values back manually and can easily forget one which is bad when you realise it next morning after hours of baking. Being able to save my pre-sets and access them would be a huge help.
Also, add few options for a quick baking: for example, set all baked light's shadows radius to 0. this would be useful when drafting the general lighting of big areas.

Allow "ambient intensity" to go further than 1. I tried to make a clouded scene and it was to dark for my taste. In real life, the sun isn't turned off, the sunlight is diffused through the clouds.

Do you like the Global Illumination workflow?
I think all the basis are there, but it need to be improved for production.

How do you spend most of your time working with our Global Illumination features? Anything bogging you down?
The "arbitrary" baking time is the problem. I don't mind if it needs 8h but I need to know.

Right now, I'm stuck on "light transport" and have absolutely no idea how much time left is needed.

When you learned to use our Global Illumination, what stumped you or had a steep learning curve?

Lack of documentation was a bit of a problem: the workflow isn't bad but it's hard to start with trial and error.

Plus, when I started on the beta few months ago, your videos presented the new interface while we still had the old: this kind of things can be confusing.