NVIDIA VXGI Dynamic Global Illumination inside Unreal Engine 4

NVIDIA VXGI Dynamic Global Illumination inside Unreal Engine 4

| Source: Nvidia VXGI Author: Mark Campbell

NVIDIA VXGI Dynamic Global Illumination inside Unreal Engine 4

When Nvidia announced their VXGI Dynamic Global Illumination GI, many of us were no doubt impressed by what Nvidia were able to accomplish. Nvidia had created a lighting technique so accurate that it was able to conclusively prove that the Moon landing were in fact real.

An artist which goes ,by the name of Byzantos, has taken Nvidia's VXGI as it currently sits in the Unreal Engine 4 and has created some beautifully lit environments and has shared his experience using it to us on his own blog.

Below is what he has to say there, as simply put shortening it down to a few measly paragraphs here would not do his work justice.

UE4: NVIDIA VXGI

A while ago NVIDIA announced its new Dynamic GI called VXGI.

Now integrated in a separate branch of Unreal Engine 4, I couldn’t resist doing some tests for fun and stuff.

Below a short compilation:

So what gives? Is this relatively new dynamic GI method worth giving a closer look? I reckon it is! Currently the most accurate solution available, nothing comes close if you’re talking about quality versus performance. Even though still a beta, it already impresses with really good colorbleed, AO and its single light bounce. Add to that NVIDIA is looking into integrating a second bounce whilst improving the output and you’ve got a really strong contender for dynamic GI in games and maybe even Arch-Viz.

Good:

Accurate ColorBleed from Diffuse

Ambient Occlusion (as opposed to Screen Space Ambient Occlusion)

Stunning GI from Emissive materials

Specular tracing offers an interesting alternative to SSR

Looks fairly good on low-settings/low-performance impact

Can look incredible on high/extreme settings

Excellent tweak and management controls

Fairly good range before quality degrades

Bad:

Requires recompile of Master Materials for Voxelization

Recompiling Master Materials takes longer than acceptable.

Poor stability when scene includes animated assets.

Prone to small lighting errors even on fully static scenes.

No GI from lit particles.

Does not support all Material types.

Specular tracing yields rather low resolution for reflections.

Small objects still need SSAO and SSR or will ‘float’.

Can be tricky to tweak for scene-specific circumstances.

Separate Unreal Branch, lagging behind core developments.

Slim chance of ever getting integrated into main branch.

In short:

Promising.

When it works it looks really good.

It does however come with a few strings attached so to call this production-ready

is simply too soon. I’ll be keeping my eyes on this one for sure!

Performance:

With the above in mind, performance was a good surprise. I have a GTX Titan GPU (not a Titan X!) and my pc can be considered ‘average’ by today’s standards. Even though VXGI can be easily set to cripple your fps (32 cones, very low trace-step etc.), if you keep things on defaults or around that range, it still allows you to have the experience without your scene becoming a slideshow. This is of course a generic impression and since polycount and scene-complexity (number of lights contributing to VXGI, shadows etc.) do impact VXGI, I guess for now performance is as good as you want it depending on your hardware and your scene-specifics.

Note: Even though this demo wasn’t done in 2 hours (creating the scenes, rendering the clips and putting the lot together took me 2 days total). It’s kind off important to mention none of it was made with the intend to impress on scene-fidelity or complexity. Geometry was kept deliberately simple as were materials, as was lighting. I was most interested in the core functionality of this tech and didn’t want to go all out before even mastering the basics. As such you should judge the quality on a different basis as if this was a video made to reflect any kind of realism. Freely translated you could close this with ‘If it already looks like this on nothing but some quick experiments, imagine what it can look like if given some hardcore lovin’

I hope you enjoyed reading all of the above!



What IS VXGI?

1) VXGI .PDF by NVIDIA

2) NVIDIA Gameworks on Unreal Engine 4 Forum

You can join the discussion on Byzantos amazing work with Nvidia's VXGI on the OC3D Forums.

NVIDIA's VXGI Dynamic Global Illumination inside Unreal Engine 4 looks beautiful. http://t.co/lDoWqPL9bB pic.twitter.com/SUtvZcrCyZ — OC3D (@OC3D) April 5, 2015

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