Glad to see someone trying it out =) So far it has just been me in a test level so it’s kindof surprising to see it work with arbitrary content. One warning though - there is a known crash that will happen if you move meshes around enough with this on.
Support for material changes is in the design, I just haven’t gotten to it yet.
Instanced meshes are fully supported by all distance field lighting methods (AO, GI, shadows) in latest. For foliage you have to go into the instance settings and enable bAffectDistanceFieldLighting. It’s off by default because stuff like grass and bushes with high instance counts can really destroy performance.
I am working on landscape GI at this very moment =) My goal is to combine surfel GI with heightfield GI to get a dynamic GI solution for outdoors. It has to be a separate implementation because surfels don’t scale up to huge surface area that well, and terrains need to be represented by heightfields instead of distance fields, so a different ray tracing kernel is needed.
One note - you can actually do non-uniform scaling (squishing) as long as you only squish by say a factor of 2 difference between dimensions. I was a bit over-strict when I wrote the , in practice the lighting looks fine with only limited non-uniform scaling.
Compared to LPV here’s how I see Distance Field GI:
- Vastly higher quality indirect shadowing - leaking is actually solvable
- More detail in color bleeding - material is evaluated per surfel (disk) isntead of for a huge voxel
- Much higher view distance, not limited by volume texture scaling
- Only single bounce for now (can be improved)
- Have to be able to represent your scene with distance fields / heightfields
Yeah I haven’t done anything for indirect specular yet, and metal is fully specular. I will keep thinking about this. The problem is that one of the expensive steps (irradiance cache interpolation) is already heavy with just interpolating float3 Irradiance, if I try to store directionality which is needed for specular it will get a lot slower. Will probably have to bite the bullet on that anyway.