Going 4K resolution with many lights

[sebastian.vesenmayer]

Hi,

we are now integrating lights for our airport scenes.

We tried to implement it with LightProj Objects and are generating very much of them (>300).

They have no shadows enabled but can use much screen space.

We enabled visibility distance but it looks very odd when moving over the airport and suddenly lights go on or off.

I did some profiling and the worst case I approached was arround 20 ms on the gpu for the deferred light pass for 170 lights in the viewport.

Are there any other possibilitys in the engine to bake lights for open world environments which don't use that much processing power?

Since we are running 4K we want at least approach stable 30 fps.

I appended the microprofile dump to this message.

Thanks in advance.

Sebastian

 

 

MicroProfile Capture.html

[silent]

Hi Sebastian,

The issue here is the high screen resolution.

With the latest releases (starting with 2.8) we've introduced interleaved lights rendering, that should increase performance for the high screen resolution. But as always happens in realtime - it may introduce some unwanted artifacts.

We are also working right now on a Lightmaps baking tool (hope to ship with 2.10 release if everything will work as expected), so in some cases you will be able to disable all the lights and use only lightmaps.

Btw, could you please specify your GPU Model?

 

[silent]

Another approach may be using Omni lights instead of Proj lights. Omni lights (unlike any other type) has tiling optimizations when rendering without shadows (you can check Oil Platform demo, there are a lot of tiled Omni lights used).

You can control batching (tiles) via console commands:

• render_lights_max_per_batch
• render_lights_tile_grid_size

There are also some additional console commands related to lightning (e.g. how many lights applied on a forward objects) worth to mention: https://developer.unigine.com/en/docs/2.9/code/console/#light_and_shade

[sebastian.vesenmayer]

On 8/31/2019 at 4:30 AM, silent said:

Hi Sebastian,

The issue here is the high screen resolution.

With the latest releases (starting with 2.8) we've introduced interleaved lights rendering, that should increase performance for the high screen resolution. But as always happens in realtime - it may introduce some unwanted artifacts.

We are also working right now on a Lightmaps baking tool (hope to ship with 2.10 release if everything will work as expected), so in some cases you will be able to disable all the lights and use only lightmaps.

Btw, could you please specify your GPU Model?

 

We are going to use NVIDIA RTX 2070 for minimum hardware requirements.

[sebastian.vesenmayer]

Is it possible, as a workarround, to render all light sources in a texture and use this texture as a projection from one projected light source from high above? Or is there a orthographic version of projective lights?

Edited September 2, 2019 by sebastian.vesenmayer

[silent]

I would recommend to switch to the tiled omni lights first and see if the performance will be higher.

What you are suggesting is more looks like a light-mapper tool. You can bake lightning in 3rd party DCC tool and use lightmaps for that.

 

Quote

Or is there a orthographic version of projective lights?

There is no such object available out of the box.