March 28th, 2023 Livestream

Lumen / Nanite

https://youtube.com/embed/oLl9SZht-bE?autoplay=1&start=669&end=2569

Transcript

right I talked about the fact that we couldn't unveil unreal and five the reason yeah the reason why was because we wanted to get like we wanted to do a prop run Rail and not just unveilance just not just say like update

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, for a couple of reasons actually and that's two next topics that we're going to be talking about and that's nanite and Lumen for those who don't know nanite and Lumen are two like Technologies or I'd say technology, within Unreal Engine that they've made specifically for Unreal Engine, that one handles Global elimination I'm going to say GI from now on because saying Global elimination over and over again is really tricky so GI is global elimination and the nanite is like a, it's a, it was a car I'm gonna try and use the proper term but it's it's essentially like a clustered way of, calculating when you're looking at a model in 3D which polygons are actually visible per pixel because you can end up in a situation where if you have a model and you move it way back and the whole entirety of the model fits within one pixel the the Shader is still gonna like send all that data to to the GPU and it's still gonna do like all the like calculations of how to render and then it's going to find out that like all that rendering is happening on one pixel and then it just decides like here's the color of that pixel like that's essentially what happens on the GPU right the the GPU is essentially just taking like data from what's going on in CPU and then this calculator like per pixel like what color should the pixel have based on on what's being rendered on screen at the moment and that it essentially boils models down so that it only essentially this is dumbed down because there's a lot of techniques into it but essentially it boils down to like it figuring out like what parts of a model are being rendered at the moment and then that sends the GPU there's a couple of limitations with that, one is that you lose a little bit of artistic like control because a lot of times you all like artists use like normal maps and like all those kind of buffers that that come in with the regular old system of rendering and you can sort of like bake in more information and then like kind of cheat the system a little bit, that is not possible anymore so you have to go with like the rendering pipeline that is designed for Lumen or sorry design for nanite, so because of that we've decided to well not because of that but that's one aspect of it, and for us we're mainly going to use nanite on the the rocks that we have in our game because those The Cliffs and the rocks are already pretty high like density wise polygon wise, I remember one early meeting with epic where they were critiquing us for having way too high fidelity, like models for the cliffs and the rocks in our game, they they they told us that like the only reason why you'd have this much Fidelity for our Cliff should be if you're making like a rock climbing game or something like that, and that stuck with me really

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, so so that is like really useful for us, to use Nani for that, however a lot of people have asked or talked about the fact that you can also use nanite on foliage and that's something that's somewhat new in Unreal Engine that wasn't part of like the initial release of Unreal Engine 5 but they've since added it because nanite has the issue that a lot of times you can only use it for static meshes which is meshes that can't move, now technically foliage don't move but there's a bunch of like Shader magic happening where like you have leaves swaying and like grass moving and stuff like that so it originally it wasn't really possible to use nanite for you know that kind of magic but now epic has support for that so it is technically possible to make, use nanite for foliage however we will probably not do that for a couple of reasons one is that, we would need to sort of we have so much foliage in our game that we can't just like press one button and convert it all to nanite we would sort of need to like go in hand fix a bunch of stuff and it would just be too much work at this point of development, if we were to start from scratch and have the knowledge that we have now and be like we're gonna make satisfactory we're gonna use honorable engine five we probably would have used, nanite for foliage but as things are right now it is probably not doable, the same question also comes to machines and stuff like that using Nani for that I think that's something we want to do is the same kind of deal there's a lot of resource that needs to be spent on sort of converting our models to be able to utilize nanite, but that is more likely, than than converting our foliage to an airline so which is a little bit of a bummer because we'll talk about that in a bit but, it's a little bit of bummer because it the the biggest gain of using nanite is really when you're rendering from a distance so, and you guys will see that in a second actually because I've got a bunch of footage prepared for today where we will showcase some of this stuff, yeah so like distance and Jace talked about this in the video where like if you're rendering for far away you know we can have higher density density models for for Stuff further back, so like you could see the entirety of the the world potentially in the future instead of like all those boxes and stuff like that, so that's nanite Lumen is another thing and luminous we're kind of supporting Lumen we will have the option for you to be able to turn on lumen and now and, yeah we'll talk about that too in a second, so I kind of forgot about this step but I kind of want to go back a little a bit and talk about rendering in general too, and and, I have a little segment prepared here actually for that so I saw a lot of comments from people saying that like the game is gonna look so much better now that it's on a related in five and and like like that's one of the reasons why we moved so the game will not drastically change in terms of what it looks like because from real London five, just just just want to point that out even with lumen in in a lot of cases and I'm going to sort of see I'm kind of curious actually, if people will be able to even Spot the Difference between what the game looks like now and what the game will look like in update 8. so I have prepared a little quiz sort of not a quiz but like this little game show here, so I've got, I have set up five shots five different locations in the world and I'm going to be showing you footage from update seven and I'm going to show you footage from today in update eight but you're not gonna know which one is which, so so essentially what we're gonna do is we're just gonna spam in chat which one you think is which one so there's going to be two options there's going to be a and b, and sometimes a is update seven sometimes a is update eight vice versa so you never know and then we'll have a reveal don't do it yet we haven't seen the footage yet okay calm down, so hopefully Mike should work in the scene, and let's dive into spot number one all right here we go so here's one spot here's a here's the game at this point and then for comparison we have spot B all right it's gonna loop again so which one do you think is which do you think which one is update eight is B A or B update a oh a lot of B's here let's see we'll go back to a here ah interesting well we're going back and forth I think I've seen more bees than A's though or maybe not it's a little bit divided I feel like people are mostly voting B though all right we'll see in five four here comes a bigger reveal all right so a was update seven and B was updated in this example yeah so there you see the difference, some of this stuff is like I'm gonna pause here whoops, let's go back to the video or not there we go, so I'm just gonna pause over here so some of this stuff though is that we've updated this biome a little bit, I believe so like some stuff may move around possibly

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, I will see so that was the that was the that was the first one how did you all do I feel like most people managed to see it though so let's jump into the the next one here we go there's another one here's option A behind door number a this is what it looks like and then he's behind door number two with his b so which one do you think is update eight A or B let's see huh a lot of ace I feel like when the thing is on the screen I get more of one of them but I feel like this is more people are more leaning into a here very interesting very interesting yes yes I guess we'll have to find out in five seconds here we go oh my God which one was it a was up there eight so y'all got one two hell yeah, you can kind of tell from let's see here in this example the fog is a bit more announced in this one because of I guess something rendering wise right because something is different in the rendering pipeline I also a lot of people might mentioned the smoke, it's possible that the smoke has been updated, the VFX that is I don't know if that actually is changed but, yeah look at that we just counted the voxels all right let's jump straight into this the third option here and I think this is this is, you're all gonna get this one so option one which is a could this be updated could this be update seven well I don't know oh did you guys know and here's option b this one should be yeah look at that a lot of bees y'all are catching over quicker either you guys play the game too much or you're just really good guessers which kind of gave that one away but the fact that I'm saying that the waterfalls I don't I don't know if the waterfalls have changed actually but yeah let's see what it is Could It Be A or B so Update 7 is a and update 8 is B so this is a really good example actually of how nanite like drastically improves the clips so if you look here in the far distance, on the cliffs there's a lot more detail in update that is in update seven and that is because we get that like that advantage of using nanite on Clips, so instead of using the lauded version of the cliffs, we can use like the actual model, so yeah pretty dope all right spot number four here we go here we are Northern forests and here's option A and then in a few seconds we have option b which is inch oh this was a little bit more split actually a lot of a lot of split here okay this one wasn't as obvious B poison looks more multimetric I don't know if the that has changed too much, which is interesting actually yeah so the detail and B all right the this might surprise you Chad because a is actually updated in this instance, and this one is a little bit tricky because it actually looks like a downgrade in this yeah a little bit Bamboozled, somebody mentioned that was better detail in the gas I don't think it actually has changed between, like update eight and seven, but so the thing here this is a little bit about Boozle because in update we've changed the, since we're moving the system the world partitioning system, we are like loading in assets in a different way, so and here we haven't fully set that up sometimes in certain cases it might not load in enough sort of so in this case you don't see the entirety of the Northern Forest in the background there you see like there's a little hole there it's a gap whereas here it's much more detailed so here in update, this in this particular spot we're a little bit more, like we're not loading in as much as we are in update seven but that is also we'll talk more about that but that is also one of the drawbacks of how it is in order for the fact that we had to load an entirety of of tiles whereas now we actually do have the option, to sort of load in half and half, so yeah and then lastly we have another Northern Forest Spot, so here is option A and then we have option b over here oh people going B so with the knowledge potentially yeah of what I told you just a second ago it might be quite obvious yeah it's true like watching this on stream as well you don't get the full like quality experience if you will, but it is what it is so what could it be Chad which one was it I feel like most people yeah it's updated is is option A is updated and B is update seven ah tricky tricky yeah, yeah it's it's, it's not as obvious sometimes, so here's like actually the opposite so here it actually does load in, in update a it loads better in this particular spot than when we're in originally, and that kind of stuff is stuff that we need to tweak yeah baited, actually I wonder if I up I wonder if this is true actually I need to double check this yeah I'm wondering I'm not sure if this is true actually now that I think about it I want to I want to verify this it's not been up for sure I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case

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let's see here let me open up the the thing

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I think like the the main point is I think most of you guys notice because you are all all die hard satisfactory players, when I started playing update a I didn't really notice that big of a difference, but when you compare them side by side is quite obvious, let's see what number was that that was five

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five yeah I did up it's supposed to be the other round, so we were not Bamboozled it was actually I Bamboozled myself too I was like wait was it not that instance but, yeah ignore that last one yeah so w for this chat so so it was only really the, the second one I think or the third one that was kind of difficult to notice, but I think the if anything speaking of nanite and that's kind of wanted to get to this point really was that, not this one this one was the fact that Cliffs now look way better at the distance at a distance, so that's like that's like one of the biggest gains when using that eye for Eclipse compared to the regular way of blotting them etc etc so yeah I actually have more stuff on this though, also just want to mention that like the clips won't be like higher like we won't improve the Fidelity of the cliffs, like they'll be the same quality as they are in the right now in the game it's just that the lauding is the the major thing where it changes so when raw clubbing that's a good question, billboarding it we were never billboarding The Cliffs, we we billboard the trees and like the foliage and that will still be the case, because yeah that's how it works let's see here, 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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, one more thing that I kind of wanted to talk about before we leave Lumina nanite is that or maybe this is a miscellaneous thing maybe I will get to that later actually never mind, so another thing Jace talked about in the video is virtual Shadow Maps which is just tldr it's like a way to make shadows more detailed and look better and it's more efficient and you can have higher resolution on Shadows, but that only means something if you know how Shadows are rendered with Shadow Maps, because there's a bunch of different techniques how you can render shadows and if you're using Shadow Maps then they there's a dependency of resolution and virtual Shadow Maps makes this a dashboard resolution is like more Dynamic but we're not using that and we probably won't use that but we'll see, cool that was Lumen and nanite, dope so let's move on and we're just we like we just touched on the first ballpoint or an hour in okay there's a reason why that video was 40 minutes okay, how Lumen works with vehicle lights Lumen will work the same way with vehicle lights as they will with regular light so so like this is the same deal we actually do emit like the regular way with with vehicles but Lumen will take the emissive material part of the vehicles as well and and do that stiff too like every light and every emissive material in the game will be the treated the same way inside and when you use the Lumen essentially, all right let's talk about the world