French dev koola has made an incredibly lifelike series of videos demonstrating the power of Unreal Engine 4’s lighting effects.
What makes these videos even more impressive is that koola explained he does not really like to do modeling or work with UVs. Koola claims he used a very simple process to pull off these effects. Koola also created these demos on a relatively older build, with a two year old GTX 670 and an Intel i7-3770.
As Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney has pointed out, Unreal Engine 4 uses several graphical effects to simulate sparse voxel octree global illumination, or SVOGI for short. While they decided not to use actual SVOGI over concerns the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One might not be capable of processing it, the effects they did use are more efficient and effectively do the same thing. As it is now, UE4 is capable of realistic real-time reflections, realistic lighting, and using both direct lighting and pre-computed global illumination.
These videos demonstrated Unreal Engine’s raw capabilities so well that Epic Games VP Mark Rein tweeted it out. You can watch koola's UE4 demo videos below.
