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Stunning ArchViz with UE4

polycounter lvl 10
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melviso polycounter lvl 10
I stumbled on this while googling around:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAAPTiuFdwU&list=UUpL6btTFD1yTtSUeapW3fNA&index=6

This guy has been creating remarkable stuff using ue4.Seems he has a good graps of ue4 lighting features using a reflector to get soft shadows. Still puzzled if he is using LPV? Or he is using a lightmap baked from an offline renderer like Vray or mental ray?

His latest work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gC0PdspqNYk&list=UUpL6btTFD1yTtSUeapW3fNA&index=1

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  • Jacky
  • skyline5gtr
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    skyline5gtr polycounter lvl 9
    Its good stuff, but unwrapping all those little object must be a pain in the ass as oppose to just using a vray shader
  • melviso
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    melviso polycounter lvl 10
    That's true. With mental ray or vray, there is no need for lightmaps or uvmapping a seperate uvsets for that.
    For a lot of reasons, using these offline renderers are way easier but they take longer to render.
  • Shrike
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    Shrike interpolator
    In Cryengine you dont need to unwrap for lightmaps, and in the upcoming unity 5 neither, as they use realtime GI that is voxel based or of sorts. But videos are looking very nice. I started with offline, and realtime is just such a blessing imo. I just sat a couple hours on a slime and skin shader that could have been done in 30 minutes if I just could see it in real time, and things are starting to look really good in realtime, just things like lightmaps are just such an unnecessary burden
  • Fogbrain
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    Fogbrain polycounter lvl 5
    Hopefully lightmaps in UE4 will be a thing of the past, because they are truly the most painful aspect of the engine I reckon. I cannot tell how many problems I've seen people have with lightmapping and the process behind it, and I can definitely say I've had a few hair pulling moments myself.

    I don't think he used Vray to render this, I thought he just said the render settings in UE4 were made to be Vray 'like'.
  • ZacD
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    ZacD ngon master
    This scene is in UE4 and fully dynamic, UE4 has the same LPV that CryEngine uses as a beta features. And Epic is looking to support better real time GI solutions.

    [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOkJ1-vnh-s"]UE4 : "dynamic" sun/sky test - YouTube[/ame]
  • Lokidottir
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    Lokidottir polycounter lvl 5
    just making the cross over from archviz work to game art myself and starting to experiment in UE4, and seeing what can be done in real time is really giving me a buzz, this guys work is stunning :-D
  • Higuy
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    Higuy polycounter lvl 9
    Wow, looks super awesome. Almost real in some cases.
  • Ged
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    Ged interpolator
    looks great, I did a little archviz style work in vray in the past and so much time was spent creating materials and editing render settings to get rid of noise problems or atifacts and caching radiosity for animation etc etc! so much of that could be faster real time now even if you have to uv map everything.
  • Skamberin
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    Skamberin polycounter lvl 13
    Stunning work :) Kind of want a puzzle game based around manipulating light and shadow in arch viz environments now, heh.
  • Ace-Angel
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    Ace-Angel polycounter lvl 12
    Just remember that Arch-Viz presentations are always the best looking renders (offline or real-time) for a reason, their simplicity and what they are trying to mimic in that simplicity.

    I'm pretty sure if you threw in a couple of organic looking characters in that scene, with an intricate fountain from Italy, you would quickly run into more then a few headaches.
  • TAN
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    TAN polycounter lvl 12
    The GI solution in UE is experimental and you have to enable it with Cvars. And I need to say it is nowhere production ready like Snowdrop or CryEngine.

    Also I have been trying engines for a while now for a personal project and please let me tell this: When you put a real time GI solution in your engine it does not work miraclously. You need to implement the "idea" of real time GI make that work with your specific shaders AND make great performance with it.

    UE4 currently lacks only in this department in competence to other engines. They announced a Screen Space Sub Surface Scattering ( SS SSS :D ) solution to come in future builds ( 4.5 maybe ? ) but still you have no specific "organic" shaders like hair, ocean etc.

    In past they tried SVOGI solution but proved unbelievably costly ( in terms of performance) so they dropped it.

    All that said I am really looking forward to day that UE adopts the What You See is What You Get mentality. Considering the all the current powerfull engines UE4 is the only one which has a static ideology.
  • JordanN
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    JordanN interpolator
    TAN wrote: »
    The GI solution in UE is experimental and you have to enable it with Cvars. And I need to say it is nowhere production ready like Snowdrop or CryEngine.
    Fable Legends is built with UE4 and it uses it.
  • ZacD
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    ZacD ngon master
    It's still not fully implemented into every feature in the engine, so that's why you have to enable it with the .ini files, I'm sure they'll have a realtime GI solution fully integrated into the engine as soon as they can.
  • TAN
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    TAN polycounter lvl 12
    JordanN wrote: »
    Fable Legends is built with UE4 and it uses it.

    Oh, good catch there. Thanks for pointing it :) In fact it was the Lionhead team that made the secondary harmonics real time GI solution and Epic interlaced that to their engine builds. Wait there was a blog about it. Oh here:

    http://www.lionhead.com/blog/2014/april/17/dynamic-global-illumination-in-fable-legends/



    ZacD wrote: »
    It's still not fully implemented into every feature in the engine, so that's why you have to enable it with the .ini files, I'm sure they'll have a realtime GI solution fully integrated into the engine as soon as they can.

    That is what I hope from my heart mate. I am using CryEngine right now but it feels soooo alone to be using it. I really want to be a part of active developer community and using world-class tech to make something with people.

    I really wish that one morning I will wake up, check around the net with my black coffe as I always do, and see an update on Epic's site that " New Build: Switching to Dynamic GI, Bounce Lighting and Translucent Shaders ! "

    Then I will do this ( add a cup of coffee somewhere in your mind)

    [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWizDna1XO4"]Mr. Bison: YES!!! HD - YouTube[/ame]
  • ZacD
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    ZacD ngon master
    I'm hoping it happens before Fortnite comes out, because they do need realtime GI for that game.
  • TAN
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    TAN polycounter lvl 12
    And I hope it comes out before I am 35 :D


    They had released a baked-in skylight single-bounce lighting solution for that team. Yeah it is static, but I guess it is still fine ???
  • melviso
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    melviso polycounter lvl 10
    Unity5 now supports dynamic GI using Enlighten if my memory serves me right. So why haven't UE4 incoporated Enlighten or they want to come up with their own dynamic GI?
  • TAN
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    TAN polycounter lvl 12
    Please somebody correct me if I am wrong but; Enlighten really destroys performance although it brings really good lighting solution.

    I remember playing the battlefield and my PC going " HNNNGH" . After you just drop the shader one level below everything just plays perfectly.

    I suppose that is why. Like I said, you need to implement the whole "idea" of realtime GI. Just putting a setting there and saying " Here you go people" almost never works.
  • Matt Fagan
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    Matt Fagan polycounter lvl 9
    UE4 has had Enlighten for well over a year now...
  • ZacD
  • JordanN
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    JordanN interpolator
    ZacD wrote: »

    It's very good. One issue I have though is the lack of AO. If you look at objects like the pillow or some objects resting on the floor, there is zero shadow information between them making it look very "Toy Story"-ish.

    It's like he's using multiple lights in that scene instead of letting indirect lighting from the sky do the work. That said, it's still the most photorealistic thing I've seen from the engine since Koola.
  • Xoliul
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    Xoliul polycounter lvl 14
    Matt Fagan wrote: »
    UE4 has had Enlighten for well over a year now...

    I think you have a to get a license for that separately, which will cost a lot. Way too much for individual users.
  • Brygelsmack
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    Brygelsmack polycounter lvl 11
    ZacD wrote: »
    Visuals are great, but it bothers me when people overdo their materials. I mean the floor looks sticky and gross, as if someone dropped soda on it. I'd much rather see shadows on the chair, because no shadows takes the realism right out of it.
  • iniside
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    iniside polycounter lvl 6
    Shrike wrote: »
    In Cryengine you dont need to unwrap for lightmaps, and in the upcoming unity 5 neither, as they use realtime GI that is voxel based or of sorts. But videos are looking very nice. I started with offline, and realtime is just such a blessing imo. I just sat a couple hours on a slime and skin shader that could have been done in 30 minutes if I just could see it in real time, and things are starting to look really good in realtime, just things like lightmaps are just such an unnecessary burden

    Well, you don't need to unwrapp for unity (when you use Enligthen), because Enligthen requires you to create proxy mesh(!!) and unwrapp this proxy mesh. GL with that.

    Unity 5 doesn't use any Voxel based solution for lighting. No engine does, because it extremely heavy on memory. Voxel could be probably used to simulate indirect shadowing, as it is fairly cheap operation.
  • TAN
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    TAN polycounter lvl 12
    Well the currently used method is Light Propagation Volumes ( LPV) you can search for that.

    The Voxel solution ( Sparse Voxel Octotree GI or SVOGI) has been tried by both Epic and Crytek and both dropped it later as far as I know. Because at that time consoles couldn't handle it.
  • xvampire
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    xvampire polycounter lvl 14
    7JfM7h2.png

    that bokeh DOF , need to be fixed, , need to find new way to tackle this old school prob >_>

    ... probably everyone still have the same problem
  • ZacD
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    ZacD ngon master
    TAN wrote: »
    Well the currently used method is Light Propagation Volumes ( LPV) you can search for that.

    The Voxel solution ( Sparse Voxel Octotree GI or SVOGI) has been tried by both Epic and Crytek and both dropped it later as far as I know. Because at that time consoles couldn't handle it.

    SVOGI isn't even practical for high end PCs. It works well enough for a tech demo, but those have always been smaller scenes. Fortnite is a PC exclusive and they still had to ditch SVOGI for performance reasons.
  • HeliosDoubleSix
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    HeliosDoubleSix polycounter lvl 3
    Hi everyone, I have been playing with Enligthen myself in Unity 5 ( beta ) after being inspired by Koola, parts of Enligthen are amazing the realtime stuff is lovely ( can't really cast shadows or anything ) Being able to change materials and such without rebaking allows for a lot of fast iteration and playing, especially as you can make walls emit light whenever you like :-)

    I have just put up a rather length ramble on the whole subject with many pictures at various stages of success and failure, Hopefully this will inspire some more people in turn!

    http://www.shadowood.uk/Store/?u=2014-09-01

    I'll just attach a few of the images here:

    img-1PastedGraphic58.jpg
    PastedGraphic54.jpg
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    PastedGraphic38.jpg
    PastedGraphic47.jpg
    PastedGraphic51.jpgPastedGraphic33.jpg
  • ZacD
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    ZacD ngon master
    Why are you hijacking this thread too? Just post some links, you signed up just to embed Unity 5 screenshots into a UE4 thread?
  • HeliosDoubleSix
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    HeliosDoubleSix polycounter lvl 3
    ZacD wrote: »
    Why are you hijacking this thread too? Just post some links, you signed up just to embed Unity 5 screenshots into a UE4 thread?

    It is a thread about ArchViz ( in a general discussion context ) I don't think it really matters what engine it uses, ArchViz is the problem domain and the people who do it care about the rendering not what engine they use to do it. The Images are posted to save people the effort of clicking a link and being taken away from the discussion, sorry if you find images so troublesome though, you have my permission to scroll past them.

    Some people act like the engine they use is a religion or something
  • ZacD
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    ZacD ngon master
  • martinszeme
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    martinszeme polycounter lvl 8
    I made a small R&D test to see what look I could achieve with just UE4, no colour corrections etc. [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHt7pUesc8s"]VIZ 01 - YouTube[/ame]
    Also how do you embed youtube videos here?
  • xvampire
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    xvampire polycounter lvl 14
    for now, ^ remove S on HTTPS link, use HTTP instead , dont use youtube shortcut link.
    ( I hope polycount fix this old alogarithm :3 )
  • martinszeme
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    martinszeme polycounter lvl 8
    Thanks xvampire! It worked great! Sorry to clutter up the thread.
  • melviso
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    melviso polycounter lvl 10
    [vv]105490485[/vv]

    Latest work using Koola's technique..not there yet

    One thing I have noticed is tweaking the base lightmass.ini parameters does nothing for me.It seems to still be the same. whereas if I use the world settings, the difference is noticeable. Anyone notice this?

    This seems to occur with ppl using GTX 700 series cards..I think.
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