Demo401: Finally, some good news!
Hello everyone!
Derek here.
At the risk of eating my words, I am happy to report to you that the engine issues I have been dealing with appear to have been resolved.
You see, it all started during development of V2.0, when it became apparent that there were some performance and memory bugs in Unreal V5.1.1, which I was only partially able to work around.
As I continued working, it was clear I needed to update the engine once those issues were fixed.
Enter Unreal 5.2:
Unfortunately, Unreal 5.2 shipped with several bugs that affected light baking. Most notably, there was an overocclusion issue. See example here: https://imgsli.com/MjEyMDky
This meant that Unreal 5.2 was not suitable for the demo, and we continued to wait.
Unreal 5.3:
Initial indications were good that Unreal 5.3 was going to work for the demo. However, once the update released and all the plugins the demo relies on became available, it became clear that yet again there were issues that affected light baking.
One of the issues in 5.3 was with emissive lighting. In Demo401, most of the lights directly utilize emissive materials to emit light rather than point lights. In 5.3, the first bounce of emissive lights was not being displayed, making the light bakes look completely incorrect.
However, the main issue was a bug where in many cases, the materials of many meshes did not compile for static lighting correctly, and were therefore completely invisible to the light baker.
A few weeks ago Epic uploaded fixes to these problems onto the Unreal Engine Github, and would be integrated into UE5.4 when it released.
A few days ago I began the process of building a custom version of UE5.3 that would have the fixes backported into it.
This process was further delayed due to an issue with a plugin causing crashes.
However, finally, as of today, I have resolved the crashing issue, and completed the custom build of the engine. So far I have not found any issues in it, and so I will begin the process of lightbaking for V2.1 of the demo.
At this point I'm not going to give a timeline for release, but it should not be that far away now. Enjoy a couple super early preview lightbakes. This is with the new High Dynamic Range postprocessing preset selected.
Thank you all very much for your patience.
Comments (10)
So 2.1 ready yet?
Any further news when this will be available?
I found a 3D render modell of the rudder stearing gear room on this site - highly recommend to check it out: https://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/community/threads/olympic-class-steering-engine.54729/
I seriously don’t feel worthy of this. It’s too beautiful for my eyes. Thank you for all your hard work with building this. It’s wonderful and a beautiful gift to the world 💙
Greatly appreciate your persistence and attention to detail in this effort Derek! 5.2's overbaking definitely gave those creases the look of dirty grout, which had to be SO frustrating. Glad to hear the road to resolution is getting clearer!
Thanks for the bug fix update, i noticed some incorrect lightning and reflections on some cabins and walls too. Can't wait for more news about the coming update ... would be so cool if y could make the forecastle deck accessable through the 3rd class D-Deck stairways + my No.1 whish for a new area would still be the rudder steering gear room :)
Sorry to disappoint you. I thought we said it before, but V2.1 doesn't add anything new. No new spaces. It fixes a lot of issues in V2.0, and the general lighting quality is higher. A few more options in the settings, like better FOV controls, a lighting dynamic range adjustment. Material fixes, reflection quality upgrades, and potatoes are back.
Sweet! Thank you Derek.
I can't see what the issue is but I'll take your word for it
It looks so amazing, it could be a real photo! I can hardly wait to walk around Titanic with these lighting updates, but these things take time. Keep up the good work, I know our patience will pay off!