I highly recommend Threat Interactive video about this game as well. The video is called: The Price of Realism? | SH2R Optimization From The GPU Perspective
Just found your content and gotta say - it's awesome! Love your lighting analysis. Would you be interested in explaining how would you make a small outdoor scene without lumen with static/baked lighting? I player back4blood recently and found out it was made in Unreal. Looks incredible yet very performant. Keep up with recording - I really enjoy watching the videos.
Thanks so much! And yes, I plan to do a more in-depth video covering the various lighting methods in UE. I'll have to revisit back4blood, I played a bit, but didn't realize it was made in Unreal.
Looking forward to hearing more on lighting as my game could definitely do with some help with regard to optimisation. Lumen is already disabled but I hope you cover a little more about baked lighting as I'm sure it would really help :D
I hope u will cover baked lighting ASAP! Especially how or when to use it with dynamic lights. Btw I like the way u analyze games and move to an engine to demonstrate ur points.
Same sentiments and approach haha! In my game i have lumen GI turned off by default via post process but have lumen reflections turned on. But have it as an option by the player. I dont like the current artifacts of lumen. So usually i just use skylight to fake GI with low settings, disable its shadows and pretty much color grade it a bit, saves lots of fps and without the lumen artifacts, and then use dyhamic lights with optimization in mind, and some dynamic lights without shadowm.
Yeah, I hate that Epic enables Lumen by default, so everyone just assumes that UE is very heavy on performance. Hope I can spread the word that you don't actually have to use Lumen and can still get great results.
I think we absolutely have the tools in the engine to fix this issue and issues like it. However, from my understanding a few different things into this. 1. engine allows for an inexperienced developer that knows zero code to build a game with the tools available, which is fine when it is an Indy developer not working on a AAA game. 2. The tools that are provided use a lot of AI generation to complete tasks that otherwise would be done by a developer who knows the specifics behind things like lighting and would be able to optimize them without nanite. 3. What can happen with some of these tools is people will know what they are doing and then have them accidentally activated at the same time which throws everything off. Causing both the thing that they actually did correctly and this tool to do much more work than they would have done individually.
so if i understand correctly 2 lights that dont uses lumen is better than a light that uses lumen in the example at 15:32. If that's the case then would 3 or 4 normal lights work better than 1 light with Lumen or?
It's not really as black and white. It depends on a bunch of things like shadows, radius of the lights, etc. In general Lumen is going to be heavier on performance just because it is calculating the bounces of lights. But it will get better and hardware will get better. Even now, Epic has introduced Megalights which can dramatically improve performance of shadow casting lights. The best thing you can do is just try to understand how they work and how many resources they take, then you can decide whether it's worth using them or not.
Can you please make a detailed video on how to make a main menu? I'd like to use a still image for the background with moving animated effects to bring the image more to life etc. Horror themed. Thank you.
Hi, I had an idea that I thought might be interesting and it occurred to me that you might be able to realise it best. I was wondering if you would like to create a video where you resolve an enigma involving some sounds. It's a concept I've never seen on TH-cam. I think it could be really unique and interesting.
@@HALbotStudios Yes, exactly! It’s like a puzzle that uses sounds. The idea came to me while I was working on an escape room video game I’m developing. I wanted to implement a sound-based puzzle. For example, I imagined a pendulum that chimes incorrectly, and as you approach and interact with it, a widget interface opens. This interface would allow the player to synchronize the pendulum to restore the correct sound, unlocking a drawer that reveals a clue. I thought of all this, but I’m not sure how to make it happen. If you like the idea, maybe you could make a video about it. Thank you so much for considering the proposal!
Great video, thank you. I noticed that your Niagara floating dust particles are also an improvement on SH2R's. Yours don't have the nasty trails that often appear. Is that due to anti-aliasing issues in UE5? I'd love to see a tutorial on how you optimised them ;)
@@boyjedi3719 good question! The Post Process Volume will override the project settings. So either way will work, but whatever you have set in the PPV is the most important.
Thanks for the quick reply. I’ve been struggling with these lights in UE after shifting from unity. These tutorials are making me able to understand. May God bless you.
It might take more effort, but it's not like it's wasted effort either. Taking the time to optimize performance, prior to release, is something sorely lacking in modern games.
That's a really good question! I don't know how easy it is. You would need a way to swap the lightmaps at runtime and I'm not aware of a way to do that.
Does anyone have a fix or this? LogRenderer: Warning: [VSM] Non-Nanite Marking Job Queue overflow. Performance may be affected. This occurs when many non-nanite meshes cover a large area of the shadow map. I have tried everything and cannot get this message to stop popping up. I have pulled up each mesh in my scene and enabled nanite. I played around with shadows and no luck. Please help.
There must be something wrong with the LUMEN technology, in Silent Hill 2, every indoor scene in the morning is dark as hell, if you enable hardware ray-tracing, all the scenes become normal.
Don't know if you can answer such a broad question but how is your editor FPS so high? When I run a scene very similar in scale to yours, Lumen off, default 57% screen percentage, etc. I get around 45-50 fps tops, with Scalability on High. Running a 7950x and 3090, I feel it should be higher and it seemingly is higher for every single UE development youtube video I watch. I must have something screwed up on my end.
Hmm, that is really odd. Are you talking about just a blank UE template map? I would imagine you should be getting much higher FPS as well. Were there any times you got better performance? On an older build? I imagine you have done most basic troubleshooting things, but I would try reinstalling the engine or maybe trying a different version, making sure your drivers are up to date, make sure there's nothing else running in the background, etc.
Ah yes... Improve performance at the cost of quality... Your scene would actually run worse in an actual game scenario if you had to fake global illumination with lights... Since you would run in the same problem as with Lumen due to the number of lights and overlapping lights. By the way Lumen is not that huge on performance if optimized properly, performance issues, in my personal experience, are usually caused by VSMs and Nanite overdraw. It really depends on what you're targetting, but disabling what makes the game look good is not "improving performance", style has a cost, and style is a choice.
Lumen is an incredible system! It's very easy to get quick results, but it's hard to argue that it is not very heavy on performance. Just simply toggling Lumen on and off in almost any scene will be a very significant difference in performance. In my experience and testing, adding a skylight with no shadows to "fake" GI does very little to performance vs using Lumen, so I am a bit confused why you think the scene would run worse with fake GI vs Lumen GI. I'm also just not a fan of the artifacts that come with Lumen. The recent S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is another good example of issues that arise from Lumen. Interiors being too dark or oddly lit, flickering, etc. I do believe real time GI with Lumen and other similar systems are the future, but I think they have a little ways to go. The addition of MegaLights in 5.5, seems to be a huge breakthrough in lighting that I'm very excited to explore and tests. Thank you for your comment though! If you have any recommendations for increasing performance with Lumen, I'd love to learn more about them as I'm sure others would.
@@HALbotStudios Of course Lumen has a cost and developers should make the right choices. I personally develop dynamic games only with dynamic time of day and all that, and I use Lumen to get somewhat accurate lighting fast. I have never been able to reproduce the quality, dynamism and accuracy of Lumen with fake techniques, at least not without working way too long to get poor results. I've also experienced the artifacts you're talking about, and it's honestly developer laziness, a quick google search will lead you to the console commands to reduce artifacts, and using local exposure properly (now production ready in 5.5 I believe) prevents oddly lit interiors. Some of the console commands do come at a slightly higher cost but it's manageable... I think Lumen is almost at its best, the introduction of Mega-Lights and the hardware tracing improvements are a huge deal in 5.5 and helped my project a lot just by updating to 5.5. To increase performance I don't really do anything with Lumen, as I said it's not my personal bottleneck, I personally focus on optimizing shadows and foliage since these are the areas causing trouble... Reducing directional light shadow resolution, preventing WPO and Opacity after a distance... I also encountered issues with Volumetrics and still have to figure out how to improve performance with that, but for Lumen I just set its quality to High instead of Epic (since High supposedly targets 60fps while Epic targets 30 on consoles)
@@HALbotStudios Please do not listen to that guy. He's parroting claims made by a donation seeking grifter called Threat Interactive who doesn't know what he's talking about. His main complaints about nanite overdraw are total bunk caused by him not reading UE documentation regarding the inaccuracy of the Overdraw Visualizer combined with Nanite meshes and not understanding how overdraw works with virtualized geometry
@@Xathian Overdraw is an issue though, one issue is that your mesh is not dense enough to limit overdraw. Another lumen issue is reflective surfaces that shouldn't be reflective,
I highly recommend Threat Interactive video about this game as well. The video is called:
The Price of Realism? | SH2R Optimization From The GPU Perspective
Just found your content and gotta say - it's awesome! Love your lighting analysis. Would you be interested in explaining how would you make a small outdoor scene without lumen with static/baked lighting? I player back4blood recently and found out it was made in Unreal. Looks incredible yet very performant. Keep up with recording - I really enjoy watching the videos.
Thanks so much! And yes, I plan to do a more in-depth video covering the various lighting methods in UE. I'll have to revisit back4blood, I played a bit, but didn't realize it was made in Unreal.
@@HALbotStudios Sweet! Unreal 4. I found myself playing it just to analyze props and lighting in the scene lol
UE5 and the lighting just elevated this game to another level. I can feel the warmth of the yellow sunset everytime it shows up.
thanks so much for your time and effort its amazing content keep going up
I love your videos so much!!! Please keep making more tutorial horror videos. Thanks so much for your effort into these videos.
Always high quality and useful video，thanks for your work！
Looking forward to hearing more on lighting as my game could definitely do with some help with regard to optimisation. Lumen is already disabled but I hope you cover a little more about baked lighting as I'm sure it would really help :D
I hope u will cover baked lighting ASAP! Especially how or when to use it with dynamic lights. Btw I like the way u analyze games and move to an engine to demonstrate ur points.
Same sentiments and approach haha! In my game i have lumen GI turned off by default via post process but have lumen reflections turned on. But have it as an option by the player.
I dont like the current artifacts of lumen. So usually i just use skylight to fake GI with low settings, disable its shadows and pretty much color grade it a bit, saves lots of fps and without the lumen artifacts, and then use dyhamic lights with optimization in mind, and some dynamic lights without shadowm.
Yeah, I hate that Epic enables Lumen by default, so everyone just assumes that UE is very heavy on performance. Hope I can spread the word that you don't actually have to use Lumen and can still get great results.
I think we absolutely have the tools in the engine to fix this issue and issues like it. However, from my understanding a few different things into this.
1. engine allows for an inexperienced developer that knows zero code to build a game with the tools available, which is fine when it is an Indy developer not working on a AAA game.
2. The tools that are provided use a lot of AI generation to complete tasks that otherwise would be done by a developer who knows the specifics behind things like lighting and would be able to optimize them without nanite.
3. What can happen with some of these tools is people will know what they are doing and then have them accidentally activated at the same time which throws everything off. Causing both the thing that they actually did correctly and this tool to do much more work than they would have done individually.
Those are great points!
Good channel
so if i understand correctly 2 lights that dont uses lumen is better than a light that uses lumen in the example at 15:32. If that's the case then would 3 or 4 normal lights work better than 1 light with Lumen or?
It's not really as black and white. It depends on a bunch of things like shadows, radius of the lights, etc. In general Lumen is going to be heavier on performance just because it is calculating the bounces of lights. But it will get better and hardware will get better. Even now, Epic has introduced Megalights which can dramatically improve performance of shadow casting lights. The best thing you can do is just try to understand how they work and how many resources they take, then you can decide whether it's worth using them or not.
@@HALbotStudios alright. thank you!
Can you please make a detailed video on how to make a main menu? I'd like to use a still image for the background with moving animated effects to bring the image more to life etc. Horror themed. Thank you.
A main menu is on my list!
Hi, I had an idea that I thought might be interesting and it occurred to me that you might be able to realise it best. I was wondering if you would like to create a video where you resolve an enigma involving some sounds. It's a concept I've never seen on TH-cam. I think it could be really unique and interesting.
What do you mean by enigma? Like a puzzle that uses sounds? Do you have any examples from games?
@@HALbotStudios Yes, exactly! It’s like a puzzle that uses sounds. The idea came to me while I was working on an escape room video game I’m developing. I wanted to implement a sound-based puzzle. For example, I imagined a pendulum that chimes incorrectly, and as you approach and interact with it, a widget interface opens. This interface would allow the player to synchronize the pendulum to restore the correct sound, unlocking a drawer that reveals a clue.
I thought of all this, but I’m not sure how to make it happen. If you like the idea, maybe you could make a video about it. Thank you so much for considering the proposal!
Great video, thank you. I noticed that your Niagara floating dust particles are also an improvement on SH2R's. Yours don't have the nasty trails that often appear. Is that due to anti-aliasing issues in UE5? I'd love to see a tutorial on how you optimised them ;)
Yeah different forms of AA can cause that trailing effect.
Thanks for your content!!, can u make a tutorial of how to make bake lights?
You're welcome! That's on my list!
I have a doubt. Should I turn the GI off in the post processing tab only or I also need to change it from lumen to none in the project settings?
@@boyjedi3719 good question! The Post Process Volume will override the project settings. So either way will work, but whatever you have set in the PPV is the most important.
Thanks for the quick reply. I’ve been struggling with these lights in UE after shifting from unity. These tutorials are making me able to understand. May God bless you.
@ glad I can help!
Do you plan to make tutorials for beginners that are trying to master blueprint?
Yeah, I should probably make a beginner's guide to Unreal. There's just so much to cover! Haha
It might take more effort, but it's not like it's wasted effort either. Taking the time to optimize performance, prior to release, is something sorely lacking in modern games.
How can we achieve turn on/off lights when we use light baking?Is it a good choice to use lighting scenarios?
That's a really good question! I don't know how easy it is. You would need a way to swap the lightmaps at runtime and I'm not aware of a way to do that.
@@HALbotStudios thanks
Does anyone have a fix or this?
LogRenderer: Warning: [VSM] Non-Nanite Marking Job Queue overflow. Performance may be affected. This occurs when many non-nanite meshes cover a large area of the shadow map.
I have tried everything and cannot get this message to stop popping up. I have pulled up each mesh in my scene and enabled nanite. I played around with shadows and no luck. Please help.
Do you have a very large map?
ждем гайд по головоломке
Thanks, you amazing
There must be something wrong with the LUMEN technology, in Silent Hill 2, every indoor scene in the morning is dark as hell, if you enable hardware ray-tracing, all the scenes become normal.
Yeah Lumen definitely has some issues. It's amazing at a software raytracing and global illumination method, but that doesn't come without bugs.
Don't know if you can answer such a broad question but how is your editor FPS so high? When I run a scene very similar in scale to yours, Lumen off, default 57% screen percentage, etc. I get around 45-50 fps tops, with Scalability on High. Running a 7950x and 3090, I feel it should be higher and it seemingly is higher for every single UE development youtube video I watch. I must have something screwed up on my end.
Hmm, that is really odd. Are you talking about just a blank UE template map? I would imagine you should be getting much higher FPS as well. Were there any times you got better performance? On an older build?
I imagine you have done most basic troubleshooting things, but I would try reinstalling the engine or maybe trying a different version, making sure your drivers are up to date, make sure there's nothing else running in the background, etc.
It's not that much extra work, the result is good and we get 30 more frames, so this is awesome :) thank you.
new video please.
I hope megalights fix performance, for me lumen is out of the table
Megalights seem very promising!
Ah yes... Improve performance at the cost of quality... Your scene would actually run worse in an actual game scenario if you had to fake global illumination with lights... Since you would run in the same problem as with Lumen due to the number of lights and overlapping lights. By the way Lumen is not that huge on performance if optimized properly, performance issues, in my personal experience, are usually caused by VSMs and Nanite overdraw.
It really depends on what you're targetting, but disabling what makes the game look good is not "improving performance", style has a cost, and style is a choice.
Lumen is an incredible system! It's very easy to get quick results, but it's hard to argue that it is not very heavy on performance. Just simply toggling Lumen on and off in almost any scene will be a very significant difference in performance.
In my experience and testing, adding a skylight with no shadows to "fake" GI does very little to performance vs using Lumen, so I am a bit confused why you think the scene would run worse with fake GI vs Lumen GI. I'm also just not a fan of the artifacts that come with Lumen. The recent S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is another good example of issues that arise from Lumen. Interiors being too dark or oddly lit, flickering, etc.
I do believe real time GI with Lumen and other similar systems are the future, but I think they have a little ways to go. The addition of MegaLights in 5.5, seems to be a huge breakthrough in lighting that I'm very excited to explore and tests.
Thank you for your comment though! If you have any recommendations for increasing performance with Lumen, I'd love to learn more about them as I'm sure others would.
@@HALbotStudios Of course Lumen has a cost and developers should make the right choices. I personally develop dynamic games only with dynamic time of day and all that, and I use Lumen to get somewhat accurate lighting fast. I have never been able to reproduce the quality, dynamism and accuracy of Lumen with fake techniques, at least not without working way too long to get poor results.
I've also experienced the artifacts you're talking about, and it's honestly developer laziness, a quick google search will lead you to the console commands to reduce artifacts, and using local exposure properly (now production ready in 5.5 I believe) prevents oddly lit interiors. Some of the console commands do come at a slightly higher cost but it's manageable...
I think Lumen is almost at its best, the introduction of Mega-Lights and the hardware tracing improvements are a huge deal in 5.5 and helped my project a lot just by updating to 5.5.
To increase performance I don't really do anything with Lumen, as I said it's not my personal bottleneck, I personally focus on optimizing shadows and foliage since these are the areas causing trouble... Reducing directional light shadow resolution, preventing WPO and Opacity after a distance... I also encountered issues with Volumetrics and still have to figure out how to improve performance with that, but for Lumen I just set its quality to High instead of Epic (since High supposedly targets 60fps while Epic targets 30 on consoles)
@@HALbotStudios Please do not listen to that guy. He's parroting claims made by a donation seeking grifter called Threat Interactive who doesn't know what he's talking about. His main complaints about nanite overdraw are total bunk caused by him not reading UE documentation regarding the inaccuracy of the Overdraw Visualizer combined with Nanite meshes and not understanding how overdraw works with virtualized geometry
@@Xathian Overdraw is an issue though, one issue is that your mesh is not dense enough to limit overdraw. Another lumen issue is reflective surfaces that shouldn't be reflective,