Actual-time World Illumination, a extra correct lighting mannequin that captures secondary bounces of surfaces as an alternative of simply the direct impact of lights within the scene, is out there in Unreal Engine within the type of Lumen and within the Godot recreation engine within the type of SDFGI. Unity nevertheless presently doesn’t have a real-time GI answer – however that’s altering with the upcoming launch of Unity 6.7.
At the moment obtainable in alpha kind, Unity 6.7 provides Floor Cache World Illumination, or SCGI, there new real-time world illumination system. Unity describe SCGI as:
Floor Cache GI is a brand new URP function that gives real-time oblique diffuse lighting and runs throughout a broad vary of gadgets. It’s designed to make authoring quicker, get rid of precomputation, and help situations involving dynamic mild and geometry corresponding to runtime development/destruction, procedurally generated content material, time of day, and rather more. Neglect advanced workflows and lengthy bake instances – Floor Cache GI goals for lighting that “simply works.”
Right here is the Unity description of the way it works:
As a substitute of baking lightmaps or probes, Floor Cache computes diffuse GI in realtime. It really works by discretizing the 5D area of all positions (3D) and instructions (2D) right into a finite variety of “patches”, mapping floor place and regular route pairs inside its quantity into a novel patch index. The scale of those patches adjustments with digital camera distance in order that we have now extra patches nearer the digital camera and fewer far-off from the digital camera.
Throughout rendering we establish which patches are related for the present body and guarantee they’re allotted. For every allotted patch, Floor Cache calculates common incoming hemispherical lighting by capturing rays into the scene. If obtainable, {hardware} accelerated ray tracing is leveraged. In any other case, a compute-based software program ray tracing backend is used as an alternative.
Lastly, we reconstruct per-pixel irradiance by filtering the patch information. This filtering course of is completed in such a method that we will apply the per-pixel shaded regular to seize nice element from regular maps.
Key Hyperlinks
Unity Floor Cache World Illumination Documentation
Establishing Unity Floor Cache World Illumination is a far too difficult course of, however fortunately the video beneath has a tutorial that takes you thru the method step-by-step. Do take into account that is presently in alpha and has quite a lot of limitations.

