Enlighten in Unity 5 and it's features (along with Unreal 4 enlighten video)

Well, I don't mean to start any trouble, since this kinda thing usually leads to trouble. But I want to ask about Enlighten, Unity 5, it just happens to involve the Unreal Engine 4 too.

We've all seen the Unity 5 Transporter demo

And now Geomerics has also enlightened the epic living room

What I want to know about is the Dynamic objects that seem to emit GI in the U4 demo, 2 mins in there is a good example.
So from what I understood of enlighten, only Static objects emit GI, so what is going on there?
Is that some trick? (mixture of point light and geometry) or just an dynamic emissive object that can emit light/GI?

Still a little unclear what enlighten CAN/CANNOT do, and what features of what it CAN do will be in Unity 5.0 and which will be added in 5.x etc.
Some info can be seen here:

As an example List:

Enlighten CAN:
- Create GI from Static objects
- Create GI using Directional Light
- Create GI from Point/Spot Light ("GI is available for all lights working in the scene" ref. from video above 0:28)
- Actual lighting can be generated from emissive objects (including Sky)
- Dynamic objects are lit with GI using Light probes

Enlighten CANNOT:
- Create GI from Dynamic Objects (or can it?)

Unity 5.0 Enlighten CAN:
- Create GI from Static objects
- Create GI using Directional Light
- Create GI from Point/Spot Light ("GI is available for all lights working in the scene" ref. from video above 0:28)
- Actual lighting can be generated from emissive objects (including Sky)
- Dynamic objects are lit with GI using Light probes

Unity 5.0 Enlighten CANNOT but eventually 5.x WILL:
- PowerVR path traced previews for real-time and baked lightmaps (not sure if this counts as an enlighten feature)
- API for controlling the real-time GI contribution between systems. (Any explanation on what this means? Like what can we make happen with this?)
- Enlighten real-time cubemaps.
- Support for real-time GI transparency.
- Cloud/cluster precompute/bake.

Unity 5.x Enlighten CANNOT:
- Create GI from Dynamic Objects (or can it?)


If anyone can help me make an Accurate list, similar to the one above, that would be great!

Thanks

 

Enlighten is basically the same as a static GI solution except the lights can move. Static objects emit indirect lighting, dynamic objects can receive it but not emit it.

 

Well there are certainly features that come under that category, although plenty of the details aren't clear at this stage.

For example see the various discussions in this thread:

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/gi-support-for-spotlights-and-pointlights.276968/

From that it is clear that GI shadowing for point and spot lights isn't in 5.0 but it is a priority to support it later.

 

Taken from the Global Illumination blog post made by Unity a while back:

What is in 5.0
These are the main features shipping in Unity 5.0:

• Enlighten run-time for in game real-time GI.
• Iterative workflow (for both real-time GI and baking).
• Reflection probes.

Beyond 5.0
As we are doing a lot of changes to the lighting workflows and lighting in general some features will slip 5.0 as they need more polish. These are some of the features that will surface during the Unity 5 cycle:

• PowerVR path traced previews for real-time and baked lightmaps (details here).
• API for controlling the real-time GI contribution between systems.
• Enlighten real-time cubemaps.
• Support for real-time GI transparency.
• Cloud/cluster precompute/bake.

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/09/18/global-illumination-in-unity-5/

There is also information about what Enlighten can and can not do in the blog post.

Also read the comments made by Unity staff in the blog post.

 

Just to clear something up, talking about Enlighten for UE4 is almost pointless because it's not implemented with the engine by default. You have to license it from Geometrics themselves, and that is probably more costly than most people reading this will want to spend. In this way, Unity is actually graphically superior to UE4 under most cases.

As for your feature breakdown, it's accurate from what I've experimented with in the beta. You might want to add that actual lighting is generated from emissive objects (including the sky) and all lighting from global illumination effects dynamic objects on a per pixel level (normal maps work) with the help of light probes. With enlighten, if you wanted to you could place light meshes in your scene that are emissive and literally light your scene with just that and have it work fully on a per-pixel level.

 

I would asume that even though you need to license it separately it can pretty much do the same things at least as far as they are integrated into the engine. If Unreal 4 does have dedicated runtime support beyond GI raytracing then the difference is only in terms of how godd each engine integrates enlighten itself. That's a completely separate thing from how much it costs to license or from where you get it.

 

Sure, it's probably the same or might even be better in UE4. All I'm saying is that very few of us are going to be able to use it in UE4, so for all intents and purposes it might as well not be a feature at all. That's like saying that you have source access to both Unity and UE4. That's technically a true statement, but it's misleading because source access is available to everyone in UE4, while for Unity you have to license it from Unity Technologies. All I wanted to do was make sure people reading this thread were aware of that.

 

Looking at some posts about Enlighten it seems it has two majors problems :
- Computing time : people experiencing from 3 hours to 10 hours on very simple scenes , is that normal ?
Does Unity lacks some sworm network thing like UE4 to have fast calculation times ?
- Required space for cache calculation, that can go to 15 Go or more to have a good quality
It's a lot, it is Enlighten way of working ? or will that change with some Unity 6 or 7 in some years ?

I prefer perhaps not as good results , but faster calculation and lighter hard disk memory needs.

 

Depends on what "very simple scenes" are. I had a testscene with 8 buildings, between 4 and 8 floors each with simple interiors. Lighting calculation was done in under ten minutes.

 

Perhaps you as lucky, as this is several people having same experience like few hours for simple scenes.
About the space, also Enlighten will just increase incredibly your game size, is this really good ? i don't think.
I would prefer to stay with other lightening techniques, less demanding in computation and not demanding so big disk.

Also the demo scenes are small rooms.
How Enlighten will behave with big outdoors levels with thousand of static assets ? time calculation and memory usage ? BattleField 4 game for example, didn't have they tweaked Enlighten in a better way than Unity ?

 

That is all assumptions and "I've heared" worded like facts.

I can tell you from my experience so far enlighten is in preview settings about as fast as Beast. You can turn the settings down so there is no need to recalculate the full quality all the time while you are changeing your scene.
Enlighten can recalculate parts of your scene that have changed instead of whole or nothing.
Enlighten can pause while you are going into play mode and resume when you exit play mode - again beast was all or nothing.
Enlighten makes you project folder bigger because of GI Caches - which you can decrease in the settings menu.
Ii you are using enlighten for static lightmaps without anything else there won't be any difference in what beast calculated for you because in that case it simply uses the same types of maps.
You will be able to better finetune the Enlighten settings (especially for terrains) in future Builds as some Unity staff members already said in several threads in the Beta forum.

Enlighten sure takes its time in higher quality settings and there it takes more time than beast - true that.
It's also still in very new to unity so there are of course still quirks and kinks to iron out. Absolutely. Yet so far I like enlighten very much and in Unity 5 so far I'm not missing Beast. I'm sure there will be certain parts that Beast did better than Enlighten but on the larger scale I can't confirm that Enlighten is as bad as you make it sound.

Perhaps it's not that othres are lucky but more that you are basing a negative opinion purely on negative assumptions you have gathered?

 

That's a totally different opinion.
But as i needed infos on Enlighten i find some downpoints of some people working on real projects experiencing these too long times and big file sizes.

Only when the public UT5 version will be out we will be able to see what is the reality working with Enlighten and computing times, memory need, final game size.

 

Just don't make the mistake of only taking in the negative opinions. It's easy to get lost in the negative on the internet.
I've played around with enlighten for a week now (Preorder Beta) and so far I really like it despite that it's all still rough around the edges. But it's a Beta so that's expected.

It will certainly have drawbacks to Beast as there is no single beast solution to everything. So far it seems to me the advantages outweigh the drawbacks. I am sure you will see more about it as soon as the Betas progress and official tutorials are released.

 

You must be right, but the people stating that points wasn't against Enlighten, they just stated the experience they had was not so good.It's a work in progress, it's a long time now it has been announced, and it will take as long to become more mature i think.
But it is usable at least , if the system can work for you, it should work for many other people indeed.

 

Personally I think UT did wrong by allocating so much developer resources and license fee's for a (Enlighten) hybrid solution that will become invalid in the near future anyways.
The future (now?) is about providing a realtime, fully dynamic GI without the requirement of doing any kind of (expensive) baking.
Browsing the forums, you can see there are several impressive realtime GI solutions WIP's already. Why doesn't UT act on that?
Also, regarding the Enlighten integration, there will be still much to improve in future Unity 5.x releases. I'm not sure it's all worth it. Somebody has to pay that bill...

 

I think people are used to "static" like resolution settings. Realtime GI is not supposed to be as high res as static GI.

But yeah, it's slower than Beast. It's also far more advanced, so there's that.

It's still early. It's a beta, the implementation is still tweaked. I share a lot of the concerns here, but as I play with the beta, I'm able to produce good results and do things I couldn't do before so I'm getting happier. Although it does seem like a system that you have to play to its strengths a lot and avoid its weaknesses, but as I said, it's beta.

 

Enlighten has been choosen because it is known and used in AAA game, it has been a decision in response to UE4 and it's price.
About other solutions, are they tested and working , workflow, computing times, memory ?
Until there is no public demos or real feedback, it will be hard to have responses to all that questions and alternatives solutions.

 

As I said, fully dynamic GI solutions are still WIP, but they look very promising. It's a field worth experimenting before committing to a hybrid solution like Enlighten that has little future anyways.
While it's true that Geomerics is a well known middleware provider, from what I understand integrating Enlighten in the Unity environment has not been easy at all. Combine the integration efforts + the Enlighten license fee and I wonder what could have been developed if UT had allocated all those resources (engineers + license fee costs) to roll out a 100% UT GI solution.

 

Not yet...Also, Enlighten does require high-end mobile devices.

 

They did in ninja camp. Unity do try these things themselves a lot

 

You can't expect doing a proper evaluation during a ninja camp, that's way to short.
Especially with the complexity that comes with realtime GI.

 

Ah the internet. Killing any good mood within seconds

 

I've edited my original post in order to make my intention more clear.
Again, I don't think a ninja camp is enough to do an evaluation and decide if it is feasible to develop a fully dynamic GI solution.

 

The thing that standout in the UE4 video is the SSR, Enlighten is the same GI middleware for both engines.
Side note, Unity 5 should have added official support for SSR (at least on their Deferred Rendering pipeline). Real-time reflections probes is really really costly. A combination of SSR and static reflections probes would be miles faster.

 

One of many reasons for people not having 1500$ to use UE4 instead.

 

+1001, I don't get it, they can receive so much graphics if they only do an SSR, and even better if they mix it with reflection probes

 

There is a mirror shader that aras (and possibly a second one) posted quite a while ago which does work. It's kinda limited to floors, but it works. It can also be easily modified to add normals etc.

 

Unreal 4 supports Enlighten but it is not included by default. You have to license it separately from Geomerics and it is considerably more expensive than Unity.

 

its not official, so new users or new studios won't just find these effects hidden in these forums,

 

Who knows what could happen later ? if Epic would make a deal with Enlighten like Unity did ?
UT or UE4 is a whole solution, not only real time GI ( for some people that would really need it )
Many game project will do great with static GI combined with dynamic lightening.

 

Epic isn't licensing any 3rd party technology. This is because they need to give full source to subscribers, so integrating 3rd party middleware is just not happening.

Their partner program is for that. The partner program allows the middleware developer to create the integration on the condition that the integration will always work and be available to people who license that middleware.

This is a good thing for them, and suits their business model.

Unity has a different business model which suits Unity but makes it much harder to provide source code - ie paying for the middleware and pre integrating it (fmod, physx, enlighten and so on).

So both companies are polar opposites here and you can consider $1500 good value if that middleware was what you wanted, and not so good value if you preferred a custom solution.

 

Epic purposefully removed the middle-ware from their engine. It was necessary to make the source so freely available.

... ninja'd by hippocoder.

 

As with everything you can find it if you search enough.

 

The price counts for many people also. Let's wait for official UT5 release to see if something will change for pricing.

 

The purpose of SSR is to avoid re-rendering the scene. A mirror reflection requires rendering the scene twice, a cube reflection requires rendering the scene 6 times (one for each side of the cube). A SSR doesn't require re-rendering anything, it just need frame depth and normals access then you just need to raymatch on the direction of the surface normal till it hit something (comparing depth values). They only drawback is that it will reflect only what you see in the framebuffer and that's where static reflection probes comes into play.
We've managed to get a pseudo SSR doing some funky framebuffer projections on mobile, for free, very cheap: .
There's plenty of advantages doing SSR, i just don't get why Unity din't added. Even if SSR is a bit heavy on mobile, it's cheaper compared to real-time cube reflections.

 

They have already officially stated that the price isn't changing. You must have missed it.

I believe it was Aras who said they do plan SSR. Just later when there's time to make it. Focussing on Unity 5 actually being complete enough to launch at the moment.

 

If I recall they stated they had no plans to change at this time. Which was back in July or August I believe.

 

@tatoforever it appears I was mis-informed. I thought SSRs were some sort of advancement on mirror reflections, but similar in principle. I think I have some reading to do.

That image looks really cool.

 

Yes, that's strange Unity didn't took consideration for it.

 

Umm they did, and still on work in progress i think, last time aras said they try to use something like killzone SSR tech

For some reason it feel like deadspace 3 ssr

 

2nd video is epic indeed!

I'd also like to hear some clarification what Enlighten is supposed to be doing. Right now I see amazing things but they are not in Unity. The current implementation is underwhelming. Dynamic GI that only works on static objects doesn't feel very dynamic.

Most of the (static) living room you see is possible in Unity5. As for the lamp that's falling over, no idea. Point lights are not working right now. And the cubes are also not possible.
Right now, everything you can do in U5 is possible in U4. The only thing you're missing is changing light settings of emissive objects at runtime. Cool effect, but also very limited right now.

 

Our technique it's a bit less acurate than regular SSR but miles faster and don't require depth/normals.

 

Would you care to explain or publish to the asset store? I've been looking for some reliable way to do reflections on iOS — I thought reflection probes would be the key, but then I realized that combining them does not work the way I believed it would so I'm currently searching for another solution.