Bake Lighting FASTER with GPU Lightmass - Unreal Engine 4.26
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 ก.ค. 2024
- GPU Lightmass was finally included as an official release by Epic and it is a vastly superior method for baking lights compared to CPU Lightmass. This tutorial will bring you up to speed!
Baking lights has always been scary, but worry not, this video will help you from start to finish.
GPU Lightmass Documentation (READ THIS)
docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/R...
Console Command for disabling Raytracing Effects:
r.RayTracing.ForceAllRayTracingEffects 0
#archviz
#unrealengine
#ue4
#gpulightmass
#tutorial
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This video is NOT sponsored. Some product links are affiliate links which means if you buy something I'll receive a small commission.
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Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
00:30 - Boring (But important!) Part
02:24 - Scene Setup
07:02 - Lightmap UV's
09:04 - Lightmap Resolution
10:33 - Slow Mode Fix
12:08 - Lightmap Compression (Get Cleaner Bakes)
13:49 - Baking HDRI's (Skylight)
15:19 - Bake What You See Mode
17:31 - Bonus Tip!
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For bake of very dark objects ( walls) you can use in master material the LightmassReplace node to use other value of Base Color luminance/brightness than this what is used for RealTime.
Then you will get more energy for bounce. You can also use in World setup Num Indirect Lighting Bounces to set proper number of bounces ( this is the only bounce parameter used by GPU Lightmass at World setup - rest is used only for CPU bake).
Wow thanks Tomasz! Do you mind if I pin this comment to the top? I'm sure many others will find this info quite useful!
Thanks Tomasz! master of real-time archviz :D
@@WilliamFaucher I do not mind at all. Thanks for your tutorials!
Thanks for those tips you guys! Does anyone know how to use a similar approach for realtime GI where a different material can be used for secondary rays? useful for instance to increase intensity or saturation in the real time bounced contribution.
Like a traditional offline raytracer would do through a rayswitch node.
Thanks!
"Under the World Settings panel, the only Lightmass setting that carries over from the CPU-based Lightmass system is the Volumetric Lightmap Detail Cell Size. It sets the size of a Volumetric Lightmap voxel at the highest density around geometry in the scene. Decreasing the size of the voxel increases the time it takes to build lighting and the amount of memory that gets used. In some cases, it can increase memory by up to a factor of eight." - docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/RenderingAndGraphics/GPULightmass/index.html
I have just started with Unreal Engine and was going through tons of tutorials so far. By far you are one of the best teachers! Thank you
Thank you so so much for this! I've been struggling for the past couple weeks ever since I got the newest AMD ray tracing cards, I thought my GPU was broken but following your video everything works great! I can't wait to start using ray traced lighting in my scene.
There are so many people teaching unreal engine but I have not seen anyone making it so easy to understand.
William really knows how to present things in the easiest way. Thanks, Man i love your video's.
Ah man thank you so much! I really appreciate that! I'm always sort of concerned if I'm too messy in the way I explain things, or if I talk too fast. So thanks for the compliment!
Totally Agree ！
I'll never get tired to say this channel is gold! It's like a book where now and then I'll come back even to the same video to check if things are done well in my file. Can't wait for the 4.27 video. Super thanks William
And I'll never get tired of the support I get from all of you, you all make my day. Thank you.
Thank you so much for this series of lighting tutorials, it is the most complete and easiest to follow, you are a great teacher.
Thanks man. I wish all tutorials were as good as this. It's to the point while not leaving out the important parts.
That's the best explanation of lightmass I have found. Two weeks saved :). Thank you very much !
Thank you for your work, William. You make the best UE tutorials on YT for sure. I appreciate you greatly
I just used my work account to give you an extra like :D and thank you for the short version, it saved me some time.
Hahah thanks so much! Appreciate it :)
Wow, was amazing especially the tip at the end. Great tutorial Thank's
thank you for doing the short version, and for laying out the basic file config
Wow that's amazing tutorial, Thank you so much for sharing William.
3year old tutorial but still one of the best. got me out of the creative block I'm having at this stage for one of the project I have been working for the architectural VR visualization instantaneously. amazing
Thank you very much! I was struggling with skylight and stationary and now its so much clear!
You're very welcome! Glad to hear it!
Absolute best lighting tutorial I've seen so far. Subscribing immediately and surfing your other videos after this!
Ah man thanks so much! I appreciate that very much! More of this coming I promise :)
That was a fantastic video, very concise and informative. Thanks for making and editing 👍
Thanks Alexander! I appreciate it!
really helpful video William
Dude you are so great. Thanks a bunch!
Man you teach in a very easy way to understand. Awesome video, congrats!
Thank you Vitor!
You are literally my Unreal Engine hero!
Awesome tips and tutorials.♥️ Keep em coming!
Thank you! I will!
Awesome, thanks for the shortened version!
Still had fun watching the stream live.
Cheers! I plan on doing both, livestreams are fun and often cover more material, but a condensed version is good to have too :)
@@WilliamFaucher Super cool! Thanks for considering both, as I don't always have the time to watch elaborate streams :)
AWESOME Tutorial !!! THX
Love the tutorials please do make more
Top notch channel. I am now your devoted follower and disciple! 🙏
Thank you so much! Welcome to the community :0
What a great video! Thank you so much Master! I look forward to the tips for outdoor scenes with GPU lightmass 4.26.
Greetings from Argentina!
Thank you Jorge! I'll be covering exteriors with GPU Lightmass soon :)
Great video William!
Thanks Yahiya!
Thanks William for your videos!
Informative as usual!
Happy to help! Thank you for watching!
What a great tip ! All things make sense now
Your tutorials are the best and always updated. Thanks a lot man. God bless you for not trying to sell a course with short tutorials here and there, i feel like you really wanna help noobs like me. 👍
Thanks so much! I really am trying to give back to the community. I will be offering paid courses in the future but for the most part, free content is where I'm going with this channel.
Really great tutorial, you're very explicative and easy to understand.
Thanks a lot!
Thank you! The pleasure is mine!
Hi buddy, I love your cutting edge UEx content, thanks for sharing! I appreciate 😎
You rock! Keep'em coming🤘
You're too kind! I will!
Another great one! Thanks William
Thanks Pablo!
For anyone who's new(ish) to lighting in general, I'd say the earlier ~2-hr livestream on lighting interiors is well worth watching in full. For me, being more of a layout/basic-previs artist, it wasn't so much "sifting thru for the useful bits of info", it was wall-to-wall useful bits. Gold everywhere. ... so if you're not already a very experienced lighter & if you have the time, I'd say it's def well worth the 2 hrs. ... TY again - as usual - for these!
Gosh thank you so much Dani! Really appreciate the kind words!
Best tutorial for GPU lightmass hands down. I watched this video multiple times while facing problems
Thank you so much!
best lighting tutorial.....no time wasting...fully loaded information only
Such an excellent tutorial!
Thanks so much!
Brilliantly presented as always! If you don't mind I would love to add two bonus tips as well: 1. In the Static Mesh Editor you have two settings for light map resolution. The first one is in the section where the setting for the light map channel is and the second one is below. If you change the resolution on the first one and click apply the engine will try to repackage the light map UV, where the second one does only change the resoution (same for the override option). This can help resolving issues if you don't have proper access to the original model. 2. In World Settings you have the options the adjust the number of light bounces from Directional and Sky Light. Increasing these can often also help to brighten up the scene instead of increasing the intensity. Because increasing the intensity comes with some side effects especially when talking about exposure and such. And don't be afraid to try some high numbers like 100 or so, because after the second iteration the light build times won't increase very drastically. Hope that helps and keep them videos coming.
Great suggestions Thoeme! Thank you!
Thank You! Super video
Cheers! Thank you!
You're an amazing teacher!
Thank you!
super helpful....Thanks a lot
Thank YOU for watching!
Thank you William!!
Thank you , it's great effort
Thanks sensei!
Thanks a lot!! Very Helpful
Thank YOU for watching!
Thanks man! Appreciated!
You're more than welcome! Pleasure is mine!
Great video! Thanks a lot! :)
Thank you!
This is perfect. Thank you so much for doing this.
The pleasure is mine!
@@WilliamFaucher Question. Why do you prefer stationary over static lighting when using GPU lightmass?
Thank you!
Great as usual.. Thanks
Thank you!
Thank you William it's very helpful clear and efficient tutorial
You're very welcome!
Ah nice one! Thanks for the live stream cutdown
Cheers!
Awesome man!
Thank you!
Thanks brother
Great video. FYI one additional tip: You can use the GIReplace shader node to modify the color used by Lightmass for baking. This is better then having to remember to alter your materials before and after every bake. (DOH! I wrote this before I saw your comment about the LightmassReplace node)!
No need to apologize! I am always very thankful for members of the community who contribute, and point out alternative solutions to the ones I talk about. I am the first to admit I don't know everything, so I am very happy to hear other points of view on topics! Thanks for writing!
Nice idea I like the short format tutorial these days its hard to find 2 hours to sit around and watch every detail. Attention spans are quite shot by research.
Thank you! I find myself liking the short format myself when watching other people's tutorials!
Hello there - THANK YOU for your videos, great and informative! :)
Thank YOU for your encouraging words!
@@WilliamFaucher I've moved from Unity, as even HDRP can not really complete with the best of Unreal. Maybe HDRP will get there but it's buggy and tricky to use right now. Where are Unreal, it all just.. works!
A question - When I load any object into my scene, a tree; a rock; anything at all - It takes a while to compile the shaders, Unity does not do this - Is it normal? Why does it take so long sometimes, even freezing my machine to add a tree into my scene!?
{I'm running Intel i5 2700k - 20 Gigs DDR3 + Asus STRIX 1080Ti}
Thanks a lot, William! Your videos are very informative and straightforward. As an architect, I usually have a hard time balancing properly a nice baked lighting for my static meshes, especially for interiors, with realistic dynamic lighting hitting the foliage outside. It would be great if you could focus on that someday. Thanks!
Thanks Joaquim! I actually plan on digging into this during a livestream sometime!
@@WilliamFaucher That would be great indeed, and once again congratulations on the content you´ve been sharing with us.
Supercool!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! amazing stuff again :D
Thank you sir!
genio!! muchas gracias, muy buenos tus video, nuevamente gracias, saludos desde argentina
I love how you explain all the things, it really make people like me who have zero knowledge about how to use unreal for interior so much helpful, thank you so much, even I use Mac m1 which don't have GPU lightmass option but still really importing things to know every thing you told. I wish someday you can make help Mac M1 user option for better light perform. Thank you again you so much help.
Thanks for watching! M1 is still incredibly new, so it's going to take a while before ARM processors are supported but I think it's only a matter of time!
Thank you
Hey coming to you from the year of 2023! Great video as always. Do you know if ray-tracing now works in UE4 for VR for the same static light based light baking process that you are showing here?
Thanks!
Thank you so much!
Great bonus tip.. It's not just a bonus it's the main correct workflow of applying material.. Bake override brighten color and then apply materials.. Thanks again..
Yeah I'm not so sure if it's the "correct" way to work, but it can certainly help with getting a better lighting!
@@WilliamFaucher have a node called "gireplace", put in your base color, and set the value 0.7, the material will appear right, and your bake will use the GI replace like 0,7 gray scale.. :D
i use that inside my opaque master material. and all instances can be change the colors, the bake will get always a good bright value
Hey William!
Thanks for the vid!
I'm guessing we're just supposed to turn of the Raytracing effects while baking right? It's fine to turn them on once baking is complete?
short and nice.
Thanks!
thx!
Epic tut
Thank you!
ah this is it... this is it! thanks!
you rock! really!
btw have you found any info on alembic streaming for 2.6?
I don't think that actually got released because when I tried it, it was unbelievably broken.
Thank U brother
The pleasure is mine!
Very great and helpful tutorial ! I'm new to UE and I'm a bit confused about ray tracing though : if we use ray tracing to build lighting, does that mean that players that don't have a RTX graphic card won't be able to play the game?
Hello William !!, long time no see, I hope everything is fine with you. I was just reviewing this tutorial because I'm trying to implement Unreal in my pipeline. My question is as follows, I tried to get the use of raytraced reflections while using GPU Lightmass for building the lights, is that even possible or I'm stuck with Screen Space Reflections when using GPU Lightmass ?. Thank you in advance and I hope to see a new tutorial soon.
Hi William ! ! Thanks for your work !!
I backing GPU Lightmass done , than I turn on Raytracing Efffect , but the raytracing it look like still affects my scene . I try to turn off all the Static object's visible in Ray Tracing , but it not working. So , did the lightmass can not to work wiht RTX Raytracing and NVIDIA DDGI ? I want to figure this out .
Thanks !
This is an interesting tip for a newcomer to static lighting, I would have one ore two things to say however ;
You can bake lighting without having to support ray tracing in your project, it is just going to use CPU instead ; also you can do gpu lightmass on AMD GPUs (RX 6000 Series or newer). This is important to note because CPU lightmass support much more features.
Lighting is not backed, nor rendered the same way between stationary and static ; especialy in Unreal 5 ; I had some drasticly different results with the same settings.
In unreal 5 (and maybe in unreal 4) there is something called Lightmass portal, which can be very usefull in this context (a room and a window) as you can give information to the baker, how light from the window affect the room.
Your last tip at the end could be replaced by a "use the lightmass switch node in your material", then you wont need to change your materials every time you bake lights.
thank you sir
i always apricated by you sir
bcoz sir ....Not everyone has rtx gpu
thank you .
i want this type of content more
thank you again
Hi! Thank you!
I know not everyone has RTX, it is unfortunate that GPU Lightmass requires it, but that's how it is right now, sorry!
@@WilliamFaucher Sir, please
can you make a detailed video on baked lighting?
with any random scene or Archviz scene would be very gratefull
No RTX , only baked lighting >>scratch to production.
So that artists like me can also help..
Would be very kind
thank you .
William, grat tip about the skylight! A question: I usually create my own cubemap from drone images. (PNG images transformed into .DDS cubemaps with the help of Nvidia Texture Tools). Would I be fine baking my skylight with this cubemap? Or should I use a workaround, where i use my custom cubemap in the HDRIBackdrop and a diferent cubemap made from a real HDRI image on the skylight slot for the cubemap?
Yeah you can use the skylight too! The only reason I used the backdrop here is because it's nice to not have a black sky. But you can change things up however you see fit!
Thanks for the tut! Love your vids. Since UE has a PBR shading model. Wouldn't we be breaking the rules of PBR if we are upping the values of the albedo for the bake's sake then reverting it back? And on the same note, should we just keep the indirect light intensity to 1 and adjust the light intensity instead to get the desired look?
Thanks!
In theory, you would be correct. If you want to do everything by the book, then technically yes, bumping up albedo for more bounce is physically incorrect. However, I abide by the philosophy that the end result is the only thing that matters. I couldn't care less if a scene is "Fully pbr", as long as it looks good.
In the example here, having darker materials resulted in a poor-quality bake. Lighting quality vastly improved with brighter albedos.
Same applies with indirect light intensity, you should be the judge here. You need to art direct your shots the way you see fit. One can't just close their eyes, enter "physically correct" values and think everything is going to be photoreal, that's not how this works, it requires a good eye for detail and an eye for what looks right.
Hope that answers your question!
thank you so much for this quick tutorial.
awesome ! i use a Ryzen 9 5950x it has much power and 16 Cores (32 Logical Cores) runs on 4.9GHz
GPU is a GTX 1080ti
do you think GPU Lightmass is better for me or it is better to let the cpu work ?
Does it makes any difference when i have a good CPU like my Ryzen 9 5950x ?
great
Thankyou
Thank YOU for watching!
Hey William, your tutorials are absolutely amazing, thanks so much for sharing your knowledge! I've just watched this one, followed your steps and disabled all raytracing effects in my scene. However by doing so, my reflective objects start to look really weird and kind of washed out. Is there a way to compensate for this as well or do you think I have to change something in my materials when using GPU lightmass?
Ah that's actually a great point! You can try using Reflection capture actors to help with that. Or, if you're feeling adventurous, try re-enabling raytracing effects in your scene to at least attempt to get Raytraced Reflections because those do look fantastic.
That's super confusing somehow. After reading the documentation I still haven't figured out what benefits you get from disabling raytracing effects when the scene looks better by having them enalbed. So re-enabling also means rebaking the scene, or am I totally wrong? I'd be more than happy if you could shade some light on this topic.
Thank you William!! I come from other 3D softwares but I'm just starting to learn Unreal and your tutorials are great and help me a lot. One thing still makes me scratch my brains... Whats the advantages of baking lights vs just using dynamic lights with RT on, is it just for performance improvement or do you actually get better quality lighting, and, would it even make any sense to consider the lightmass rout for an exterior scene? I'm just trying to figure out if you better of (quality wise) with HDRI/Static/Lightmass Banking vs dynamic sky using the Environment light mixer for example. Cheers!!
Hey there! Great question! If you watch my livestream about Interior Lighting, I do a comparison between baked lighting and dynamic lighting towards the end. You'll see for yourself. The long story short is, yes, baked lighting looks much better, AND performs better, at the cost of it being a bit more tedious to set up. Raytracing IS getting better though , so that's fun! But it comes at a huge performance cost. I can run baked levels at 120+ fps, and the same scene with raytracing can crawl at 30-40fps.
Exteriors are a bit more forgiving, and I tend to go dynamic with those, BUT, set up properly, baked lighting works great for exteriors too! Personally I love dynamic lighting, so it's really a case-by-case thing.
Hope that answers your question!
@@WilliamFaucher Great answer!! All makes sense now, will watch the livestream too as I can't resist :) Many thanks and keep up the super great work. Cheers!!
thanks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
thx
Hello. thanks a lot for your useful video. I have question. Is it normal to have 100% CPU usage while restarting after doing GPU mass adjustment in setting?
¡Gracias!
Thank you so much!
I'm trying to apply your tutorial to a very heavy scene. It's the inside of a neoclassic church with accurate architectural details, very little openings and very wide spaces all textured only with a white flat shader, thus very low level of light and very whide surfaces with the same colour, so I need to bump the quality very high to get rid of the noise on the light maps, and the GPU light mass calculation crashes if I bump up the quality too much or the map resolution too high, so I thought to split the bigger objects such as walls and floors into multiple pieces to increase the areas of UVs without bumping their resolution over 4k, but in this way I see vey visible grey seamlines in the middle of the surfaces where they are split. What's a good strategy to approach such a heavy scene?
Thanks a lot!
Such a clear video and such a great teacher!
I have just one doubt, are the directional light shoadows always sharp? is there a way to make them softer?
Thank you! To make shadows softer you need to adjust the source angle setting. I think it's called source angle. Something like that.
@@WilliamFaucher thanks a lot I'll try!
Awesome tuts but.. I don't have an rtx card..
Just started learning unreal engine using 1050ti card.
" Starting up Swarm Connection...(100%) "
Build Progress is complete but my system gets freeze , so need to close the app using task manager.
Is there a workaround this issue?
(I have an ryzen 1600 processor, 8 gb ram)
Straight to the point and very easy to follow 👌👌 I can't turn off slow mode using the ctrl+R shortcut, any idea why this might be?
Thank you! Yeah, it's a really stupid thing, too! There is a tiny triangle button to the left of the "Perspective" button on your viewport. Click on that, and there is an option that is something along the lines of "disable realtime override", I can't remember the exact wording but it's something like that. It's super weird, bugs me all the time!
@@WilliamFaucher hey thanks a lot for taking the time to reply man!!
@@emresenoglu Cheers! I try to reply to everyone ;)
Hey, I am new to UE4 and started with the UE online learning video and started watching your channel after CG spectrum Livestream
In the Video, of the course, when Importing assets, he was unchecking Option do not auto generate lighmaps as he said we will be Generating them later but the later part was not much clear, I didnt understand about it. So now every asset that I imported have only one UV set and you said that we can find documentation and video about them online. I read the Doc and mangae to builld the lightmap and it created another UV set. So I created the map by ticking the generating the lightmap under Build settings of LOD 0. Will that work for now? Right now I am trying to import one of the outdoor environment scene that I am currently working on and going to light it later. Thanks
Hey William, Ive always wanted to find out if it is possible to render out exterior scenes with skysphere, HDRI as lighting information, but without the environment itself visible, so we can possibly composite the render into real life photos or real lie footage in After effects
Yeah! Just use a skylight, instead of HDRI backdrop!
hey will... does indirect lighting intensity not work with GPU lightmasss? im using stationary directional light.. Thanks
Will, did you already run some tests using the GPU Lightmass with Lumen and Nanite? Or is this not doable? Thank you so much and keep rocking, cheers
I'm... not sure GPU Lightmass even works with lumen at all. There isn't really much point since the entire purpose of Lumen is to get baked-lighting quality in realtime. The way I see it, baked lighting is slowly going to get phased out but I could be wrong of course.
@@WilliamFaucher yes, I was wondering myself. In some forums people say you should still use baking, especially for interiors and when the frame-rate just isn’t there.
I tried an interior scene, complex with a lot of lights. It looks great in runtime with dynamic lights and Lumen, but I can’t even hit 30fps at a 1280x720 fixed resolution after packaging. That means, baking would be still somehow necessary … hmmm 🤔
quick question from the future. IN UE5 if I want to bake light what to do? just turn off lumen and just hit build light button, that's it?
Great stuff William! Do you know how to use this for multiple lighting scenarios? (Day/night) thanks
If you want a day-night cycle, animated and all, then I think you're going to have to go with a dynamic lighting approach!
I will sure give it a try! But I would very much prefer to have baked lighting. As in I bake the daytime light. Then the nighttime light. Then in the same level you choose between the two. To have no extra cost at play time