Unigine Engine Receives Massive Update, Now Has Real-Time Global Illumination

The UNIGINE, a real-time 3D engine built to run on all major platforms, including Linux, has just received yet another important update.

Unigine Engine is built by non-other than Unigine Corp., the company behind the Heaven DX11 Benchmark software. The technology they develop is getting better all the time, and with their recent expansion on the Linux platform, we’re all too glad to see that major updates have been implemented in the engine.

The most promising new feature to get integrated into the Unigine Engine is real-time global illumination based on precomputed spherical harmonics. This technique allows the rendering of high-detail diffuse lighting with inter-reflections and angle-dependent specular highlights.

According to the developers, “the stunning lightmap-like quality is achieved by using automatically generated LightProb. With such precomputed lighting approach, you can have full control over general GI settings (via Render -> Parameters -> Global parameters) or fine-tune GI component intensity for each separate location.”

Highlights of the new Unigine Engine:

• New mesh_wire_base material has been added and it can be used to create thin objects like wires, ropes, nets, etc;
• Skinned meshes with a lot of disabled strafes have been improved;
• video_renderable console command has been added enabling hardware anti-aliasing;
• Procedural textures for custom post-process materials can now be of various formats: RGBA8, R16F, RG16F, RGBA16F, R32F, RG32F, RGBA32F.
• An aspect ratio bug for horizontal and vertical split stereo modes has been repaired;
• Per-node properties are now stored in the node file;
• Support of point and line per-surface rendering modes into Unigine::ObjectMeshDynamic class has been added.

A complete list of new features, for all the platforms, is available in the official announcement.

The UNIGINE project is a massive undertaking and it’s already used in some released games, not to mention a lot more titles that haven’t hit the shelves yet.

Keep in mind that the UNIGINE graphics engine is only aimed at commercial enterprises and that not even a trial version is available for the general public.