Unigine Engine Does Real-Time Global Illumination

The Unigine Engine has been revised with a number of new features and impressive capabilities. One of several new features is "real-time global illumination with spherical harmonics", which may be a mouthful but is for delivering even more beautiful graphics.

About the real-time global illumination with spherical harmonics, Unigine Corp says, "A new, real-time global illumination based on precomputed spherical harmonics allows to render high-detail diffuse lighting with interreflections and angle-dependent specular highlights. It is fully interactive: soft environment light illuminates both static geometry in the scene and dynamic objects moving around it...The stunning lightmap-like quality is achieved by using automatically generated LightProb...Global illumination is available across all APIs and is well scalable performance-wise... As you can see, GI makes a huge difference: it brings a truly photorealistic visual quality to a scene."

Here's the difference that the global illumination makes on rendering:

Other recently-committed improvements to this cross-platform graphics engine include hugh speed-up for skinned meshes in certain conditions, hardware anti-aliasing for GUI widgets and Flash movie clips, TTF font improvements, full support for ETC2 texture compression, and an interlaced lines stereo rendering move. There's also dynamic meshes enhancements, UnigineScript advancements, and various other changes to the promising but not widely-used engine.

More information on the latest improvements to the Unigine Engine can be read about from this devlog posting.

For those still wondering about when Unigine is going to release Unigine Valley, the latest I heard out of the company several weeks ago is that Valley is basically done and released to their customers, but nothing that's publicly available yet. This is rather upsetting and really sad to see, but hopefully it will get a public unveiling soon...