Acatalept has released a new video for Singmetosleep; an atmospheric, exploration-based interactive narrative project that is powered by Epic’s Unreal Engine 4. This new video shows the new Distance Field Soft Shadows in Unreal Engine 4.5 (both the directional sun light, and a movable interior point light), as well as Light Propagation Volumes for realtime dynamic Global Illumination. It looks gorgeous, so make sure to give it a go and visit the official website of this project.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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I’m curious…
Like a fever dream, very interesting concept. It reminds me of the demo scene. They like to create abstract, weird geometry like this.
Regarding these “distance field” shadows I just did some searching and it turns out it’s not some revolutionary tech as the name would suggest. It won’t actually increase the fidelity, it’s actually a performance saver for distant shadows. Normal cascaded shadow maps (à la CryEngine) are used in the foreground as you would expect but further away they use a half-resolution ray tracing technique to only draw shadows where you’re actually looking rather than computing the distant “cascades”. Across different scenarios the performance gain on shadows alone ranges from 25% to 45%. No word on the real framerates they got out of entire scenes (not just the shadows) using the technique. Source:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/LightingAndShadows/RayTracedDistanceFieldShadowing/
Thanks! FYI, I’ve noticed several increases in fidelity using DF shadows: accurate ground contact with shadow casters ( shadow casters don’t tend to “float” above their shadows as with standard dynamic shadows, even though this could be somewhat alleviated at the cost of self-shadowing artifacts: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Resources/ContentExamples/Lighting/6_1/index.html ) — shadow penumbras with variable softness relative to distance from caster (old dynamic shadows had uniform sharpness); and no visible transitions between shadow cascades.
It’s no secret Unreal Engine 4 has amazing lighting, just waiting for more games to use it and 2015 the we should see quite a few UE4 games
Intredasting.
I got to say i love UE4!
That last point is strange: Since shadows in the foreground are still conventional cascade types shouldn’t there be a visible transition between the cascade and the DF shadows further away?
Fixed the link, thanks 😉 I should have pointed out that by default cascaded shadow maps are used in the foreground, which transition to DFSS past an editor-defined threshold: I set that threshold to zero to completely disable cascaded shadows (whose “floating” imprecise contacts look bad to me) and use DFSS throughout the entire range. I’m not sure why this default exists, but there must be advantages to near-field cascaded shadow maps over DFSS that aren’t apparent in my project.
P.S. That link sends me to a 404. Somehow “);” became part of the link so in order to make it work one has to remove those two symbols.