4.19 Physical Lights

Chosker · June 20, 2018, 1:37pm

gonna quote myself from the Svogi thread. I posted this but it quickly got lost in the discussion

btw I had a shot at the IBL thing I mentioned with reflection captures.
I was able to make reflection captures show up as lighting but the results are worse than I expected. captures can “see” to infinity which means any bright spots will leak inside windows/doors/etc indefinitely, no matter how far they are (I’d probably need a ‘maximum render view distance’ for captures, but then it wouldn’t work for reflections anymore. alternatively if captures had depth I’d be able to filter out far objects by distance, but I doubt probes have depth information).
aside from that there’s a big issue that capturing probes will accumulate over themselves each time you capture them, since they are already affecting the scene as lighting. as such, I have to turn them off every time I want to recapture and then turn them on again.

these issues severely affect its feasability, and the more engine changes I have to make, the less chance that it would ever get accepted as a pull request (chances are already slim, since they removed the DiffuseFromCaptures feature in the first place)
in any case I’m focused on other things at the moment so I can’t work on this currently. but if there’s interest I can at least post some screenshots of my progress

talking from experience, it’s possible but it’s far from being “fairly easy to hack it back in”. at this point it really means redoing the feature because the rendering and shaders changed so much since the feature was removed.