Unreal lightning (no pun intended)

http://kotaku.com/next-gen-lighting-is-pushing-the-limits-of-realism-1625324795

Thoughts on if this could be the future of arch viz?

I've seen this floating around the last couple weeks and the cynic in me has to wonder if any of that lighting or gi is baked in. It's also important to note that there aren't a lot of high-poly objects in those scenes. It's mostly made up of planes and boxes. Any high-poly objects would need to be heavily optimized or you'd start to get some chugging. I'd be interested to see him navigating those scenes with the trees in real time.

That being said, this is super impressive and it will be really interesting to see if real-time solutions start to be widely adopted by the archviz industry in the coming years.

I like Bradley's sentiment. Most people fail to realize how simplistic that demo is, and how laborious is to scale it to full scope 'archviz'.

It definitely won't be adopted widely any soon, and that's not cynical view, that's my pretty realistic view. Seeing how many people are struggling with technically relatively very simple off-line rendering with behemothic amount of ready-made assets and know-how, I don't see anyone pulling this one off much.

With that said, those shorts are impressive, and they kicked my ass to start playing with Unreal4 more, even though I had licence since April, it didn't get much use. I do suggest everyone to try it, if for nothing else, to get the idea how much work needs to be put into it to get complex result.

[[bradley: It's mixture. Most of those scenes are fully baked from stationary lights (Unreal static GI is photons/final gather(irradiance cache)), with exception of dynamic sun in those exteriors, where it's LPV, very shitty beta dynamic GI algorithm]

And last notion, real-time has been here for quite some time. It's not evolution of static imagery. Just like movies aren't evolved photography. But it will become new market product, and I am quite curious for who and where it will be most sucessfull. I don't know yet.