Global Illumination alternatives

[Frenetic_Pony]

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.

I’ve already got ideas for large terrain, and a demo I’m going to port to UE4’s Elemental Demo, yay Pixar and their ambient/faked bounce GI! But I’ve talked to artists using DRT like solutions, and they already don’t like geometry cages, and you have to pre-compute every time you change the environment, which slows down level design immensely.

I do wish you luck as well, any realtime GI is good GI, as long as it has acceptable image quality (so many solutions in the past haven’t). I’m just always suspicious of a technique that seems good on paper, but has been around for a while without a single game (that I know of) shipped.