Global Illumination alternatives

[StaticTheFox]

@KingBadger3D;69943

SVO is old news. It was a research project that at the time people jumped on because it meant things were getting near to realtime raytracing, it’s not where we should be aiming. look at this for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pjupG1YPgE&list=UUEsdpGysd9FNz4rRSeLvowQ (should also add he has a download example of his supperb work on one of his video thread). nearly six months back, it’s just not right for gpu designs right now unless you have a nuclear sub powering your machine, once it is, it’s redundant anyway. When GPU’s can efficiently do such things path tracing will be the best way of doing this with down sampling correction filters (except maybe hair, cone tracing for such things makes sense even with offline rendering).

One of the best realtime idea’s ive seen is Morgan McGuire’s realtime GI system Lighting Deep G-Buffers, after speaking with him 4-5 months back this should appear very soon, his work on transparent depth solving is also superb (his power is in his beard, the only thing i dislike is the fact he works for Nvidia which means if we let them it will just become another licensed hate attack against the overall game industry).

Ill start a thread to show the many many great works that are aimed at solving this issue, let people decide whats the best direction forward short term & long term.

Funny story, the source code for Deep G-Buffers has just been released!

http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/papers/DeepGBuffer14/

Wonder if anyone would like to take a crack at implementing this.