PLEASE CLEAR THE GI CONFUSION!!

Hello please im so confused
DOES UNITY HAVE A BUILT IN SOLUTION FOR REAL TIME GLOBAL ILLUMINATION????
like unreal engine or marmoset toolbag
Enlighten? Skyshop? as you can see i am massively confused
just a skydome with nice HDR......................................

 

Is there a tutorial for setting this up for noobs?
How about interior ArchViz lighting in unity 5 for noobs

 

The nicely lit image is using Skyshop (1st image)
The badly lit image is using unity's built in tools. (2nd image)
I'm trying to get good results using unity's built in tools without any plugins.
What am i missing?
My settings are:
I enabled HDR on camera
I made custom skybox shader by importing custom .HDR image as cubemap and assigned it to Sky Material.
I enabled Linear space in the Player settings.

 

Hey, I agree things can be confusing at first, the main issue I currently face with Unity 5.3.x Global Illumination is bake time. Nonetheless...

TL;DR: Unity 5 Lighting Cookbook
http://www.edy.es/dev/docs/unity-5-lighting-cookbook/

Now on to the TL part.

Currently Unity 5.3.x is NOT "REALTIME" Global Illumination, just Precomputed Global Illumination. Unreal Engine has no realtime GI either, UE4 only has pure realtime GI with solutions such as the UE4 build with Nvidia VXGI.

My current (armchair art director) understanding of terms in game engines. This is a layperson view and in no way technical nor super accurate:

Global Illumination
Direct and indirect lighting (bounce lighting), shadowing, everything you expect from Blender Cycles, VRay, IRay, Hollywood CGI, etc.

Pure Realtime Global Illumination
"Zero bake" - any object can change, any light can change, everything will still have direct, indirect (bounce) lighting, super-nice shadows, super-nice ambient occlusion, etc. This is the "holy grail" of games, check out UE4 VXGI, ~certain~ types of Enlighten (not in Unity in general).

Precomputed Global Illumination With Realtime GI Features
One of the big advantages of Unity 5, but needs a significant "precalculation phase" with Enlighten. Directional light can change (think day-night cycles) and all the direct, indirect (bounce) lighting etc. will change accordingly. This is nice because eg. sunlight coming in from the east-facing window will bounce realistically and also if coming in from the west-facing window. Point, spot and emissive lights also have some "global illumination" dynamism to it as well. Eg. a point light flashing (sparking) or a corridor light (emissive) can change in intensity and the "global illumination" can change in realtime to. Current disadvantage: non-static (ie. moving) objects do not get the full cool-looking "global illumination" look.

Baked Global Illumination
UE4 uses Lightmass, Unity 5 has Enlighten. In this case, the lighting is all "rendered into the scene (and objects)" and if objects or lighting changes the scene will look "funny". Think Blender Cycles, VRay, IRay, Octane, etc. except you can move around in the scene in realtime, if that makes sense. Baked GI is probably best for mobile scenes since you have fixed lights, fixed objects and some dynamic objects, a few dynamic lights.

Precomputed + Baked (Mixed) Global Illumination
No idea on this, haven't explored it yet..

AFAIK Skyshop is geared towards image-based lighting (IBL) which is slightly different from Realtime/ Precomputed/ Baked Global Illumination... but IBL techniques can be cool eg. Skyshop on per-object(?) basis (I'm not experienced with it)... or, IBL technique in Unity 5 eg. using a panoramic HDR image to light scene/ object/ reflections (cf. "Ambient Cubemap" in UE4).

In any case... with your scene in Unity 5.3.x. HDR and Linear is correct. Best to set it to Deferred Lighting, and Project Quality (Edit menu) to "Fantastic" to see things at their best.

Next, assuming the scene is static, set the objects in the scene to "Static" (checkbox in Inspector).

Then, in the Lighting panel, you want to tick the Precomputed GI (start with that first to explore precomputed GI features). Choose Directional not Directional Specular at first.

Tick "Auto". The lighting will start to build. For Precomputed GI check that all lights should be set to "Realtime" and all static objects should be set to "Static" or "Lightmap Static".

Remember to add a Reflection Probe, for that scene just one, set it to Baked or Realtime.

The "magic" happens when the lighting build is complete, you will see nice shadows, bounced lighting, indirect lighting, etc.

There's lots of tutorials and so on so this is just a quick reply, I'm no expert, just went through the ropes since Unity 5 beta.

Good luck!

Anyone feel free to clarify!

 

and now there is SEGI
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/64763
voxel-based global illumination

 

Unfortunately not cross-platform and probably never will be due to technical issues. Yes some of us still use Unity for projects across platforms, so Enlighten is still "best" option, unless Skyshop works for your project. ;-)

 

That is unbelievable. Extremely impressive.