March 28th, 2023 Livestream

Lumen on/off

https://youtube.com/embed/oLl9SZht-bE?autoplay=1&start=1800&end=2465

Transcript

so Lumen Jace mentioned Lumen so Lumen is like epics GI system that they've made, Lumen is is taking a lot of different GI like, implementations and sort of baking them together so I believe it's three different Ray tracing, techniques that are combined in Lumen which makes it really powerful because it's really efficient, the one thing though is that Lumen is a software based, GI technique so Lumen runs on your CPU and it's more proficient running it apparently on the CPU than on the GPU which is a bummer because satisfactory is very CPU intense as it is so adding Lumen on top of that, it's kind of annoying but that's not really the main reason why we're not going to use it as like being the default supported one so we're not gonna like have the game be designed for lumen in mind because we've already sort of shaded the game with the current shading model that we have, and also the fact that Lumen is a software-based renderer, which makes it very taxing and, we're going to talk a little bit also as to like what other issues come with Lumen because it's not all peaches, even if you have a good enough computer to handle it, but yeah essentially, Lumen calculates like how light bounces around it makes for a lot more like quote-unquote realistic, shading technique and I also have prepared a couple of like, example shots and just want to preface again That We're Not Gonna by default support Lumen and we're probably not going to spend I don't know if you're gonna spend any time but probably not too much time on like making sure the game works with lumen in mind

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, but it is going to be there as an option in the options menu it's going to be there as a setting for like Global illumination and you can turn it on if you want to that's totally up to you and we're gonna check out what it actually looks like, so here is the default shading module I think this model this is the most obvious one I would say so it's mostly like obvious in the shadows, when you turn it on here's another one during Tusk this is the one that's a little bit trickier to see but you can see some of the detailed here on the ground, some of the Shadows look a bit more crisp here's one in the night at the night and this one is a little bit trickier to see the only way I really spot this one is the the the water there's another one it's the same photo, like essentially what it does is makes everything look more even even a little lit essentially and here's some of the footage from the video, with the most drastic change I would say with factories Photoshop, it's really cool though it looks it makes the game look better in a lot of cases but there's one major problem with it in the way that things are right now, and I'm just gonna jump straight to that so I have another video here demonstrating that so here's here's my little home I've made it myself, this is where I live in the factory I made it's running purely on, package liquid by a bill best fuel source, so this is with Lumen off right this is the default rendering, method that we have in the game looks like it's another home just look at it running around here looking around all right so now that we have that freshly mine here's Lumen on so you can you can tell that like I'm gonna pause here real quick so like if you check the building you can see that the with Lumen on it's like a little bit more evenly lit right it looks a bit more yeah evenly lit essential and that's all fine right it's more orange, yes it's like because it's like bouncing around light on itself the problem is when I walk in this is now what Interiors look like when it's closed off from the environment so the only light sources here really are from the benches and like the mams if I remove them it goes completely dark like this is what it looks like inside a factory and this this could be cool if this is the look you're going for but it kind of makes the game unplayable unless you have lights, you know installed, so this is really cool though like- I'm not gonna lie like this is so cool being able to like open it up like this and you get like this kind of shading, but yeah one this is really one of the drawbacks of the way that when we just slap Lumin on without applying like any kind of rendering on top of it it's just going to look like this, so you really need lights in your factory and this that's something I discovered when I was taking bits's Factory it's like without lights it just looks looks like this so but if I turn it on it looks awesome right it's just we have flashlight so also the flashlight doesn't really do much, the flashlight doesn't have that much like output, I was gonna demonstrate that in this in this video but unfortunately the flashlight doesn't work in the current version but one really cool thing though with Lumen that I kind of want to explain before I show this part is, is that Lumen takes everything and treats it as a light source which is not typically how lights work in games, so there's something called an emissive texture in in or emissive materials rather where what you usually do if you have like a computer monitor in a game you usually apply a emissive texture on like the screen because it's like it's lighting up by itself but emissive textures do not light up the environment this is you this is example for example the lights on some of the factory buildings are emissive textures they don't emit any light so they don't actually affect the environment when you place them around the world but in Lumen emissive so usually what you have to do is if you do that thing and you want to have like a middle light you have to put like the computer monitor you put an emissive material on the the screen and then you put a light source where you want the light to be emitted in the game so you actually have to it's kind of weird you have to cheat a little bit so like you put the light source you put an emissive texture which is essentially just when you're shading the game on the GPU it sees like oh this is an emissive text sure I should then ignore the general lighting coming from other light sources and just like render this as it is so it's like emissive textures aren't really or emissive materials aren't really rendered in the same way as other stuff is and that's why you can get that effect where it lights up even if you have like even the lights in our game they do that right so when you're looking at a light in our game there's an emissive material which is the light source or like the light that you're looking at which is purely white or whatever color you're shading it with and then we also have a light source like that is next to the which emits the light or whatever the cool thing with Lumen is that Lumen treats emissive materials at light sources, so let me jump back to the part of the video here where was it so here so the the signs we have in our game they are all emissive materials and in Lumen they actually emit light which gives you off this like cool effect now granted you can't really light like properly because it's only rendering like the the stuff around it it's not bouncing the light from you know the source onto like the wall behind it and stuff like that it's just the surface around it but it looks really cool, and then if you go full on stupid mode you can you could try and and light the entire scene with just signs, and then it would look like this and this is this is so dope this is incredibly cool and and this was like one of the the first things I did when I was when I was goofing around in real identify was like the first thing I did was just like slap on a missive material on a ball and just put in the scene and be like oh my God it actually lights up the, so that's really cool and that's sort of if you watch the footage of, bits Factory, if I go over here you can see like bits put down signs at the bottom here and they kind of like emit a little bit of light on the ground you can see it here, it also add like a little Bloom and stuff like that but they are affecting the scene more so than what they would have not would have, wait yeah they affect the scene essentially is what I'm trying to say, but we won't be supporting Lumen like fully efficiently so like will we ever make it so that it doesn't go completely horror game like this I don't know honestly I like that's the thing right this is going to be an optional thing this is not where we're going to put effort into it, because you really need to sort of, light your game with lumen in mind if you're gonna use Lumen and, since we're not doing that you know you can on your own but you will be able to have the option to turn it on if you want to it's going to be like one of those optional things maybe you'll just do it for when you're grabbing the screenshots or whatever and when you're playing the game you just play it off, the game does run a lot better without Lumen I mean yeah so so Lumen is not more GPU intensive because Lumen runs mostly on the CPU it's a it's a software based Ray tracing, technique or a collection of, software rendering techniques, so even if you have a monster of a GPU it still wouldn't make it any better unfortunately

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