It would be to determine when something is in a shadow or not.
I know I can get by to some extent with a scene capture but with UE5 it seems like it should be doing a lot of this under the hood but I don’t know what’s exposed or needs manually exposing.
Hey there @Nonlin! So it’d be quite the feat to check for light level, as this data is already GPU side, so the simple answer is that it’s a ton of effort and often best faked.
Thanks for the input.
Would be nice if these feature get exposed to be accessed to make some newt Simulations or game mechanics.
Does seem like overkill for the moment but may take a deeper dive one day.
Absolutely! Since the source is available, it’s entirely possible, but would require some solid software engineering props to do effectively. The complexity is compounded by the fact there’s multiple overlapping lighting systems at play.
And while technically possible, it is quite expensive to pass data backwards from the GPU to the CPU, especially at large scales. This is why the method most take is to capture a texture (render target) that coarsely represents the scene, which can then be sampled on the CPU.
Agree 100% here, scene captures are a common method users use for this, however scene captures are also quite expensive resource wise if you have to update them constantly.