Topic: GI and Real-time reflection

[sach]

I was just looking at Cryengine3, this soft has GI and even has "Real-time Local Reflections (RLR)" and it a realtime render engine, so why does it seem so hard to do this with Lumion

[Ferry]

They have a bigger development team funded by big gaming titles? Of course we will try to work hard to get the best results we can get in the future.

[Aaron]

CryEngine3 'has' realtime local reflections, depending on whether you are using the MOD-SDK, which supports DX11 and has named screenspace reflections that blend in with larger environment reflections via cubemapping seamlessly (note that SSR is a cool technique but for Arch-Viz purposes it has some severe limitations, mainly the SCREEN SPACE part  ).
The MOD-SDK is unlikely to see future updates (and has very restricted usage policy)
so not much people use it these days. Especially not for anything commercially oriented.

CryEngine3 Free SDK is still DX9 so no SSR.
An Upgraded DX11 version will soon be released.
'Soon' being a rather flexible word at Crytek
but in the end they deliver and the results will
be stunning no doubt.

CryEngine Cinema Sandbox is yet to be released.
It won't be free though. Pricing rumors are
highly fluctuating.

About the GI in CE3.
Nice but not THAT nice. Don't make it a holy grail.
It's kind of a 'fake' GI as in only able to bounce off a single
color per object. Still very cool/fast but not cutting edge
enough for Arch-Viz maybe. Time will tell.

Regardless of the above, I'm a HUGE fan of CryEngine.
I just pray they would release their updates on a bit
more regular basis

[Michael Betke]

Its hard to get into the game with CE3. My investor which has a huge financial background had trouble getting in touch with them for a special license because the game-dev license doesnt apply and they are picky with their licensees like Enodo and the chineese company which did get CE3.

Lets see what will happen if this Cinema version comes up. Its a bit sad that sutdents work with the tech and show their arch-viz suff on YouTube and so on and a serious but small company doesnt get the hands on it although I think much more inovation and artistic style is on small companies and not on an over-seas asian company.

On the other hand its okay to not have everyone access to CE3 on a commercial base because the market would get flooded with arch-viz made with CE3...at the moment its flooded with Lumion work overall in real-time dev, eheh.

[Morten]

As of July 2011, CryTek mentioned that they had sold around 40 full licenses. One of those licenses was to Foster + Partners. I wonder if there are other architectural firms out there with a full license.

[Michael Betke]

I don't really know. But at least I know three companies with money which didn't get one. I also can't see a lot of CE3 made videos or so. Maybe mostly its used in-house. But for quick inhouse stuff Lumion would be the better choise because of the robust import pipeline which is a big selling point in production speed (at lweast for me).

Most other visuals depend on the assets and not on the tool. although a good tool is always helpful.

[Aaron]

I'm also at a loss as to how Crytek imagines it'll take a piece of the pie the way they move inside
the shadows right now. Perhaps they want to create a solid core market 1st by selling to proven and large clients. Still, there is nothing indicating such a policy and only recently Crytek indeed
spoke out to commit to the SDK as a pro dev platform (something that's new cause I cant recall them ever doing so with the CE2 SDK etc.) But like Michael I'm a bit cross as to why students
get the go ahead while companies except for a lucky few do not. Maybe they are too busy with
useless sidekicks like fibbledrippbleblabla and other completely uninteresting news like whatever clients they hooked on the line. As for news that really counts, at least for us, you can still count those on one hand after a year.

[Michael Betke]

In 1.5 - 2 years from now arch-viz will be on par with game-engines is my prediction. I don't need such a prestige license then anymore.

What I like about the CE3 tools is the workflow. Stuff like movie effects can be easily done in After Effects too and for most animations a AE pass is needed anyways.

Things like the Real-time GI with the lightgrid technique they use is fine now too but other people will come up with GI solutions too.

[jlnsvfx]

Cryengine3 has a real hard time with geometry - models have to be really well done.  You can import anything into Lumion.  That's why I prefer Lumion.

Don't forget the licensing price for Cryengine3 is 100,000 per seat per year - minimum 5 seat leasing.

Lumion is alot more reasonable and I am sure they will have all the features that cryengine does in the future.  Between Cryengine and Lumion I don't notice much difference in quality.  It's all in the custom maps you create.  The day lighting in Lumion is spot-on.

jlnsvfx