For my Proof of Tech, I integrated NVIDIA's VXGI to my old Detective's Office scene (seen in my portfolio page)
First thing i had to do was download the custom engine at https://github.com/NvPhysX/UnrealEngine
To access it you need a UE4 github subscription (its free)
'
Once you have your account, Download it as a zip file. Once that's done, just follow the steps on the page to get it up and running
First thing i had to do was download the custom engine at https://github.com/NvPhysX/UnrealEngine
To access it you need a UE4 github subscription (its free)
'
Once you have your account, Download it as a zip file. Once that's done, just follow the steps on the page to get it up and running
After a while, I opened my D. Office Project folder using the custom engine. I deleted all the current lights and post-processing and replaced them.
One thing to note about VXGI is that its a dynamic Global Illumination lighting system, so you have to go in to each of your lights and change them to 'Movable' so you can turn on the VXGI indirect lighting option.
Steps i did for my scene:
- Drag in VXGI Anchor
- Turn on VXGI Diffuse/Specular Tracing in Post Processing
- I set my Tracing Sparsity to 1 for dense tracing
- put 'r.VXGI.MultiBounceEnable 1' in the console and played with the Multi-Bounce Irradiance Scale
One thing to note about VXGI is that its a dynamic Global Illumination lighting system, so you have to go in to each of your lights and change them to 'Movable' so you can turn on the VXGI indirect lighting option.
Steps i did for my scene:
- Drag in VXGI Anchor
- Turn on VXGI Diffuse/Specular Tracing in Post Processing
- I set my Tracing Sparsity to 1 for dense tracing
- put 'r.VXGI.MultiBounceEnable 1' in the console and played with the Multi-Bounce Irradiance Scale
Irradiance Scale= 0 1 2
I( used 0.75 in my final scene)
- I also added a city backdrop to my scene. To do that i just took a picture for google, made a material that was 'Translucent' and 'Unlit', then i plugged in the picture to the Emissive Channel.
- I played around with the other settings too
I( used 0.75 in my final scene)
- I also added a city backdrop to my scene. To do that i just took a picture for google, made a material that was 'Translucent' and 'Unlit', then i plugged in the picture to the Emissive Channel.
- I played around with the other settings too
added a simple lamp for the final scene to light that side of the room better.
BEFORE AFTER
I do think that the overall scene improved a lot after everything.
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I do think that the overall scene improved a lot after everything.
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Stuff that worked, stuff that didn't, and hardships along the way
Backdrop
One of the challenges i faced during the past week or so was doing the Cityscape backdrop. At first i used a plane with a texture on it, but it blocked the light coming in from the window.
After hours of searching for answers online, i found out that you can set the material to 'Translucent' and 'Unlit' and plug the picture in to the emissive channel.
VXGI Lighting
In the beginning i struggled a bit with making VXGI work, I was panicking because the lights weren't working. Later on i managed to make it work by reading a bunch of pdfs by NVIDIA and spending hours in the UE4 forums.
Depth of Field
Some people might not notice it, but there is a slight DoF in the Final scene picture that i posted. I tried all 3 of them. I never figured out how Circle DoF worked I set everything to 0 and set everything to max and didn't see any difference. While, Bokeh for me was a bit 'dirty' looking. I tried to fix it by lowering the blur sizes and playing around with the transitions but i still couldn't make it look right.
So, in the final scene i used Gaussian. I played around with the settings a lot (transitions/blur sizes)
Something i found extremely helpful while tweaking the DoF was you can see the near/far transitions and focal distance using 'Visualize' in UE4