Then, we’d be able to have a temporally stable DFAO-alternative that also runs in forward shading, and we’d be able to turn this:
…into this:
(I achieved the second picture by copy and pasting the diagonal beam several times, which goes to show how the current constraint is arbitrary)
With the right capsule shadow configurations (increasing r.CapsuleMaxIndirectOcclusionDistance and r.CapsuleSkyAngleScale), we can achieve a much longer indirect shadow that’s soft, and paints everything under it darker, very much like DFAO. However, with these settings, this extremely useful shadow becomes extremely faint, and we have no good way to make it more prominent. Currently, we’re limited to a clamped “Distance Field Indirect Shadow Min Visibility” value in the range of [0, 1], which only acts as a ‘turn off’ switch, while what we really need is a ‘multiply’ setting.
DFAO is nice, but impossible to tame for select use-cases, as it isn’t temporally stable, and consequently has a lot of visual artifacts. With what’s probably a one-liner somewhere in the capsule shadows rendering code, it’d have a worthy rival, and empower developers targeting forward rendered projects.