i want dynamic global illumination

[Warby]

after seeing the unreal engine 4 demo people have claimed that "other engines"have been doing dynamic global illumination for a while now and cryengine always came up and indeed i remember crytek advertising that their engine can do dynamic gi

exhibit A:

exhibit B: http://www.crytek.com/cryengine/present ... ryengine-3

exhibit C: http://www.crytek.com/cryengine/cryengi ... lumination

i downloaded the cry-sdk and am reading /searching the documentation and the only thing i can find about GI is this (a setting within the "time of day window" called "global illumination multiplier"):

http://freesdk.crydev.net/display/SDKDO ... ime+Of+Day

but all that seems to do is add a "directional-light" that points upwards( +y axis). it doesnt pickup the color from anything in the world and doesnt hit walls that are at a 90° angel next to it like it does in that new-york apartment video. first i feared that its not working because my config-specs were set to low but it turns out they were set to very high(the highest) than i thought its probably because my gfx card only supports dx9.0c and not 11 but the tech demo video from crytek claims to also have been captured with dx9

so whats going on here ? where is that promised gi ? what am i doing wrong or was this all just marketing fluff ?

does anybody know any other cool dynamic gi implementation in another engine =?=

[Buddy]

That GI they marketed didnt end up in the game afaik (or ridiculously dumbed down)

[AlexM]

I havent had a lot of experience with the SDK but from playing the games and the little experience I do have it looks like just direct lighting with SSAO on top.

Are there any examples of realtime GI or gathering? I remember Nvidia released Gelato and that was like a really fast renderer, Then they bought mental images and cancelled gelato about 3 years ago. Haven't heard anything since.

[AtsEst]

Here is an article by a crydev member regarding his findings about the GI solution: http://www.crydev.net/viewtopic.php?f=1 ... 61#p802861 as you can see there are a lot of variables that contribute to the final quality and give and take between them, that is just the stuff what you have to deal with limited computation power.

I prefer to use environment probes in conjunction with hand placed ambient lights (only subtle use GI where I find it necessary), I just feel that this approach offers so much more control over the final look compared to any automated global solution. Though it can be a pain when dealing with scenes that have a dynamic nature.

[Pericolos0]

Problem with the crytek GI is that it only simulates one bounce I think, which is really not enough to be worth it. You need multiple bounces, AO etc for it to look convincing.

farcry 3 uses a similar approach, it looks very cool imo: http://engineroom.ubi.com/wp-content/bi ... lowres.pdf

I wouldnt be surprised if this solution pops up in unity and other game engines soon as well. It's a simple and elegant solution though it does have it's limitations

[e-freak]

cryengine GI in the current FreeSDK is limited to outdoor lighting (using the Sun light as a primary light source) but is fully dynamic. I don't think the current implementation in the FreeSDK is the latest version (

) but its optimized to run on an Xbox 360 and PS3.

There's a second component to this which is the directional light up which you can specify in your Time of Day cycle. This is used to generate a more even lighting from below, but this is limited to one color and strength per Minute in the ToD cycle. You can alter at which height its attacking though, which prevents objects in the Sky from receiving direct influence.

Last but not least is the image based lighting, taking the idea of Cubemaps but instead of only using them for reflections also using them for a subtle lighting of the environment. This is an entirely static solution, but you can generate these cubemaps (or environment probes) at different times during your tod cycle and then have them triggered and replaced through Flowgraph (or if you're into coding, you could probably come up with a nice automated solution for this).

The Voxelation approach Epic adopted for UE4 is not working on the old platforms without major downscaling or tinkering involved. FarCry 3 seems to use the same tech we are using (more or less).

edit: just a little p.s.: this is my understanding of the current tech as an artist, not as some kind of engine guru

[-HP-]

One can dream, this is still ways off...

[Warby]

i am getting that feeling too

but still it cant hurt to follow the slow progress closely

thanks to atsest and e-freak lots of quality information in your posts

[robert.briscoe]

Yep Realtime GI still has a long way to go imo, I'll be especially glad to see a more accurate replacement for SSAO; am I the only one who thinks it looks hideous?

[Buddy]

Yep Realtime GI still has a long way to go imo, I'll be especially glad to see a more accurate replacement for SSAO; am I the only one who thinks it looks hideous?

Especially in Cryengine.

[-HP-]

Yep Realtime GI still has a long way to go imo, I'll be especially glad to see a more accurate replacement for SSAO; am I the only one who thinks it looks hideous?

Especially in Cryengine.

CryEngine3 now uses SSDO, a much better system.

I also hate SSAO with a passion, it indtruduces shitloads of artifacts, ghosting, picture noise among other stuff. But I guess that's the problem with using screen space sollutions, it's cheaper (way cheaper) but it doesnt look as good as full blown photons or radiosity solution, of course.

Having worked at Crytek for so many years, I predict it will probably the first to make a decent one in the future, Mr Tiago Sousa will make sure of that, the best god damn graphics programmer I've ever seen. For now, other engines are trying workarounds such as a blend of the two techniques, look at DICE's engine, you have a bunch of ScreenSpace stuff working on top of baked GI lighting and it works great but it's obviously not as pleasant to work with baked solutions as it is with real-time.

[Pericolos0]

Yeah it's kind off funny how we all collectively decided SSAO looks good haha.

Though there are definitely good looking ssao solutions, they tend to be expensive. So most game engines usually have a really crappy cheap ssao solution that doesn't even look like AO at all. Some really awful ones that almost look like a cartoon silhouette shader(deus ex, uncharted 2 etc) or look like dirt (udk) lol.

[Jetsetlemming]

Yeah it's kind off funny how we all collectively decided SSAO looks good haha.

Though there are definitely good looking ssao solutions, they tend to be expensive. So most game engines usually have a really crappy cheap ssao solution that doesn't even look like AO at all. Some really awful ones that almost look like a cartoon silhouette shader(deus ex, uncharted 2 etc) or look like dirt (udk) lol.

Or magic radiation like in kane and lynch 2.