Pretty obvious SDF-like reflections here, Not from Lumen?
Even the quality knob for GI functions similar in visual results to what 5.0 quality knobs did. Very curious to know what is up!
Actually you are right. There should be lumen.
Long story short, I feel odd about not having lumen showing up in all the frames I captured via RDC, so I contacted my friend at GS today. I got the confirmation that Lumen is indeed in use if GI is set to cinematic without Raytracing. It took us sometime to figure out that there's actually a bug. When I switched the graphics toggle from Low to Cinematic, there's a chance that the actual settings don't get refreshed properly. So the whole render pipeline stays as what it was beforehand. Looks like I hit that 1% bad luck
![Frown :( :(](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
. Sorry for any improper hype that I have raised.
Anyways, I re-did the captures in a few more locations and here're the corrected findings:
A quick update on the shadowmap, this is a bit more adaptive that what I thought. Its configuration gets tweaked on an area based. Later in the game I found 3-cascaded setups (and this is on Cinematic) in contrast to the 5-cascaded setup earlier.
Fluids seems to be simulated via Niagara.
Back to the GI. Previously I said it was "brute force" from what i've seen in the frame capture. Now, I'm notified that this was the fallback solution to Nanite when GI is set to
LOW. Essentially, the contribution of the GI is from a global Skybox and a local cubemap. In this case, the global Skybox for the first chapter is a HDR cubemap picked from Unreal's HDR Asset Database (recognized by one of my friends), so it's not really reflecting the actual environment. Though, the local cubemap is a real capture of the surroundings.
![QQ图片20240823004642.png QQ图片20240823004642.png](https://forum.beyond3d.com/data/attachments/11/11904-2b181b25d3845cd31d3a6a7f9ca8c71d.jpg)
That's why I spotted blue hues on the bottom of a stone sitting on the grasslands. It's your typical light leaking artifact.
They did to try to reduce the leaking problem in Low GI quality. First off is the classic SSAO, running at full res but not so high sample count (remapped here to increase contrast) . Nothing special.
![Snipaste_2024-08-23_00-48-09.png Snipaste_2024-08-23_00-48-09.png](https://forum.beyond3d.com/data/attachments/11/11906-e9d49c14f2196e532228651ea5a22c51.jpg)
Then there's the DFAO which was what I saw last night. It's initially traced at 1/64 res and then both temporal and spatially filtered and upscaled to 1/4 of the internal res.
![Snipaste_2024-08-23_00-52-36.png Snipaste_2024-08-23_00-52-36.png](https://forum.beyond3d.com/data/attachments/11/11908-6fdefcd402f2997f524a43bcaeb757ce.jpg)
(All the res scale I mentioned is the final scale multiplying both axis)
Then, on the actual cinematic mode, Lumen is turned on, and you can clearly see every step of Lumen in the capture. From placing probes to generating surface caches, and etc. In short, the quality is reasonably high. Probes are placed uniformly at 1/16 res with adaptive placement on depth discontinuities. Surface caches have a 4096x4096 atlas.
Later the GI is gathered at full res, outputting diffuse gi and translucent gi.
However, that random HDR cubemap is still present
![Wink ;) ;)](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
, even in Lumen as the backup for skybox.
![1724346131117.png 1724346131117.png](https://forum.beyond3d.com/data/attachments/11/11912-7747fcdf733177515c3b88d4bd10a81e.jpg)
Think that pretty sums up my findings. Most of the options seem to be straight from the early versions of UE5 ignoring the raytracing part. I was more curious about how UE5 performs under what graphics levels. Still very demanding.