Global Illumination alternatives

[iniside]

@Frenetic Pony;138121

Eh, there’s a reason people don’t like it. Art production just gets more headaches, which is not something anyone needs, and diffuse only is rather useless for anything but specific art direction. Offline CG had reflections before it ever had proper diffuse GI, and yet it still holds up (if done well) because reflections are incredibly important for distinguishing between materials.

The reason many are so interested in voxel cone tracing is because it requires absolutely no art production (yay!) and can scale between diffuse low frequency GI and high frequency GI. Despite Epic’s continued scepticism, I’d say voxel cone tracing will end up in triple A games this generation eventually, they gave up far too easily without looking at brick maps, tiled resources, null pointers for empty voxels (a feature in D3D11.2) and etc. It can work, and scales very well with number of dynamic lights.

There is no added cost to art production using DRT with premade geometry cages. You can either generate them automatically using LOD generation tools, like Simplygon, you can reuse LODs you already created, or you can reuse collision geometry which you already created.
All you have to do next is to precompute once, and you can modify lighting as you see fit.

You are welcome to pursue SVOGI and I wish you good luck, but honesttly I think it is dead end, unless you can show me solution which will work on 5km x 5km landscape full of objects.
All attempets that have been shown today, are confifned to either very small spaces, or with pretty much empty maps.

And yes all radiance transfer techniques do not work well for glossy reflections, but they work well for solving big subset of issues quite well. Like light transmission, indirect shadowing, and diffused reflections.