Hit lighting fares fine with most materials. I’m referring to the surface cache.
Since the surface cache computes the materials from fixed camera angles / cards, in this example of a fresnel we can see it has blended together a capture from every side, resulting in the fresnel being totally broken.
For a screen trace, the fuller the coverage, the more accurately it will reproduce the effect - But it will still have a jarring discontinuity at the transition point regardless of method.
On a material like this, I’d ideally want to use hit lighting and skip the trace altogether.
But without hwrt I think I’d rather keep the screen trace, since it will at least be accurate sometimes where as the surface cache will be accurate never.
So the question becomes, if I have a scene with POM or some other effect that doesn’t play nice with traces but I don’t want to disable them entirely for that shading model - what can act as my switch?
The only thing I can come up with is that the custom stencil could… while it’s widely used for other stuff, it would be the least disruptive place I can think of.
You could have a particular bit or range to act as a mask to skip traces, and the rest of the stencil bits could work as normal.
People who need the entire range of the stencil buffer are probably a smaller edge case than screen trace artifacts.
It could be as simple as a checkbox and int range to select the bits.
“Skip screen traces on custom stencil value/range [x-y]”