Just to clear up any confusion here:
Lightmass is an offline tool that generates bounced lighting information for an unreal scene. It generates DXTC1 textures for all the lit geometry in the world, stored in two textures as colour+primary direction. These textures can get quite big (as you might imagine) given they uniquely texture all the lit geometry in the level. A number of shipped games have used it, I believe the second army of two game was the first.
Also, they store a signed distance fields for prebaked shadows. This basically means a prebaked direct lighting shadow for the sun.
They support cascading shadow maps, so the sun can have dynamic shadows off select (or all) objects, combined with the precomputed shadows. Or a mix (precomputed shadows at distance, etc).
Lightmass can also bake in direct lighting for lights as well. This is pretty common actually.
There is no real-time GI in this system. I am also unaware of any precomputed GI relighting techniques for dynamic objects - other than artist defined techniques.
Their SSAO implementation is a post process operation, which is why it looks a bit wrong - as it will darken all lighting, not just ambient. It is temporally reprojected, so it gets accumulated over multiple frames which is why it is most obvious when the camera is still. The temporal effect was really strong in Gears 2, however it's been toned down since (and is customizable).
Finally, as far as I'm aware, UE3 has always done vector motion blur, right back to gears 1. You can certainly tweak motion blur on a per-object basis now.
Lightmass is an offline tool that generates bounced lighting information for an unreal scene. It generates DXTC1 textures for all the lit geometry in the world, stored in two textures as colour+primary direction. These textures can get quite big (as you might imagine) given they uniquely texture all the lit geometry in the level. A number of shipped games have used it, I believe the second army of two game was the first.
Also, they store a signed distance fields for prebaked shadows. This basically means a prebaked direct lighting shadow for the sun.
They support cascading shadow maps, so the sun can have dynamic shadows off select (or all) objects, combined with the precomputed shadows. Or a mix (precomputed shadows at distance, etc).
Lightmass can also bake in direct lighting for lights as well. This is pretty common actually.
There is no real-time GI in this system. I am also unaware of any precomputed GI relighting techniques for dynamic objects - other than artist defined techniques.
Their SSAO implementation is a post process operation, which is why it looks a bit wrong - as it will darken all lighting, not just ambient. It is temporally reprojected, so it gets accumulated over multiple frames which is why it is most obvious when the camera is still. The temporal effect was really strong in Gears 2, however it's been toned down since (and is customizable).
Finally, as far as I'm aware, UE3 has always done vector motion blur, right back to gears 1. You can certainly tweak motion blur on a per-object basis now.
