But as you can see, these levels are very small. And yet they run with a frame rate of 30 to 60 fps. So doing a whole RPG with large outdoor levels and many NPCs is not possible with this technology. I have to make a compromise. And my compromise is to refrain from intensive real-time calculations, wherever it is possible.
Originally Posted By: sivan
Imo to approximate the forest photos you linked, you cannot use photo lights shadows at all, only if you recreate exactly the real environment in your scene, which will make your project enormous,...
No, I will not recreate exactly the real environment. I only recreate small parts of the real environment. And these small 'pieces' will be cloned and combined to a much bigger game level.
And I will use a combination of ...
... real shadows from the original photos/textures (e.g. shadows of small stones, lying on the ground),
... pre-rendered baked shadows calculated with 3dsMax (for bigger shadows - e.g. for shadows of trees or buildings),
... and also some realtime shadows for moving objects.
Originally Posted By: sivan
... but it would not result in realistic leaf rendering taking into account Sun and camera directions. I mean lights going through leaves, what I can make in UE4 easily but requires dynamic lighting and subsurface scattering.
You don't need all these things when lighting does not change in the game level. When you go into a forest making photos of all the leaves above you, then these leaves already look like they should look like. Then you don't need subsurface scattering and other things to make them look realistic. Because the leaves on the photos are realistic.
But you are right, in some cases it is necessary to use subsurface scattering and PBR and other things. E.g. when the leave of a tree is located at the eye level of the player, and the leave is placed in front of a light source (e.g. a campfire). But this will be used very rarely in my game levels.
