Descrição
VoxelGI brings fully dynamic, real-time global illumination to Unreal Engine 5 — no lightmaps, no bakes, no waiting.
Every frame, VoxelGI voxelizes your scene into a compact camera-centered volume, lights it from the sun, sky and local lights, then cone-traces indirect lighting straight from the GBuffer. The result is living GI that reacts to moving lights and geometry within a few frames. Following the architecture of CryEngine's SVOGI, the diffuse path ray-marches a lit voxel world rather than the raw triangle scene, reserving hardware ray tracing for where it matters most: crisp mirror reflections.
What it produces
Diffuse GI with color bleeding — light bounces up to four times, picking up the color of the surfaces it reflects from.
Large-scale ambient occlusion — soft contact darkening in corners, recesses and under geometry, derived from the same cone traces.
Rough specular — a voxel reflection cone whose aperture widens with roughness.
Ray-traced mirror reflections — real reflection rays through the engine's material pipeline for smooth surfaces, shaded with true material color and kept consistent with the GI.
Dynamic lighting response — sun, sky and up to 16 local point/spot lights injected into the voxels; move a light and GI updates in a few frames.
Built for control
A single settings panel (Window ▸ Voxel GI Settings) exposes everything: volume resolution and extent, bounce count, cone aperture and stepping, color-bleed saturation and intensity, temporal filtering, and independent diffuse/specular trace resolutions. Five debug views (radiance voxels, diffuse GI, AO, albedo voxels, specular) plus an on-screen stats overlay let you verify each stage in isolation and dial in performance.
Performance-minded by design
Sparse voxel octree storage (CryEngine SVOGI layout) — only occupied 8×8×8 bricks consume memory, and empty space is skipped during cone marching. Falls back to dense volumes with identical results if preferred.
Amortized voxelization spread across frames keeps per-frame cost low.
Half-resolution tracing with bilateral upscale for diffuse and specular, tunable independently.
Temporal accumulation with neighborhood clamping for stability under motion.
Ships with a full tuning guide covering interior, large-exterior, sharp-reflection and performance-first presets, plus troubleshooting for the common cases (foggy GI, washed-out scenes, missing color bleed, brick-budget exhaustion, motion smearing).
Technical notes
Target engine: Unreal Engine 5.8. Renderer private headers are pinned to 5.8 and must be re-synced on engine upgrade.
Requires hardware ray tracing (D3D12 / SM6): inline RayQuery for voxelization, ray-gen for reflections. Enable Support Hardware Ray Tracing in Project Settings.
Set the project Global Illumination method so the ray tracing scene (TLAS) is built.
The composite runs 1:1 at BeforeDOF
Includes Runtime + Editor modules, global shaders and RDG passes, delivered as a self-contained scene-view-extension renderer plugin.