koobas.hobune.stream
Dynamic lighting, no baking, best result?
First off, just started evaling Unity Pro 2 days ago. Awesome overall, I'm blown away! Except... the lighting story for "99% dynamic worlds".
Consider the very first screenshot on Unity's own "Water" tutorial page from 2010. I know they use a fancy skybox but generally lighting and big, long-distance shadows from the rocks look fabulous. Is this kind of lighting only possible with pre-baked lightmapping, or using Deferred can one tweak the directional light intensity, HDR and tonemappers to get to a similar level of fidelity?
I built up my own similar sandbox world with ocean, terrain, palm-trees etc but without indirect lighting / fake GI it looks "too old-school" even with the Pro-edition full-screen post effects applied and tweaked as best as possible.
Now consider, what I want to build will have little to none static content that can be pre-baked, from the terrain (heightmap) to the meshes stuff will be loaded from servers and might be user-generated or procedurally generated.
Consider Red Dead Redemption, released over 2 years ago. They haven't pre-baked their entire game world, have they? Especially considering the dynamic changes in weather, day and night, climate zones etc. Are they using a fake-GI approximation that could code up in Unity shaders?
(Also for the Unity team -- not sure if they're listening in threads here -- you guys want Unity 4 to become "the democratic AAA engine", right? Well I don't see your dynamic realtime GI story for that release yet... upcoming Unreal Engine 4 has one, CryEngine 3 had one and will be upgrading theirs in their 4 release I guess. Sure, it's all "fake" GI from a physically-correct-rendering perspective, but still pretty great compared to direct+ambient-lighting-only for game devs. With DX11 support, what's Unity's dynamic/real-time fake GI plans for 4?)
Did you hear back about this? I'm running into the same issue here. I have pro and a game that is all user generated. No lightmapping option for me at all. I really want my game to look the best and beast does look great if you can use it but it seems there is no option for runtime baking.
I found, normal dynamic lighting with SSAO is by and large "just fine" --- but there's also a number of helpers/improvers such as "Sunshine" and "Dynamic GI" on the Asset Store to further refinement.
"runtiime baking", do you mean when the level is loaded? The thing is, baking takes a while... a long while, so unless you want your users to wait 20 $$anonymous$$utes for the level to load, or if you want them to have 0.05fpm I don't suggest you have "runtime baking" :)
