In the branch, skylights recently had an update that allows you to blend between environment maps, which would be useful for any situation that calls for a changing sky color (weather or day/night cycle being the obvious ones).
Skylights when basing a scene off of VXGI also encounter a few problems when it comes to occlusion. Without DFAO to help it out, shadows don’t get the same kind of occlusion that other lights would with VXGI, and makes it look a bit flat. The problem surfaces even more if a scene is partially indoors and partially outdoors, like if there’s a building with a wall gone, where you can’t outright disable the skylight since that would make all the shadows outdoors black, but keeping it on tints the entire interior of the building the color.
Of course, having the skylight bounce and transmit lighting data would be nice as well, if an object is in shadow currently then it doesn’t get -any- bounce light from below, even in the slightest, no matter how bright the shadow may be from the skylight.
Skylights also don’t contribute to the specular reflections as they are right now, it only shows the diffuse reflections if you look at an object that’s using them. Makes it look a little weird, even adding an environment map to the specular (the option there currently) just fixes the background, with the objects casting shadows being pitch black where the shadows hit.
Treating the skylight like an area light somehow (no idea if it would be too expensive to be viable) would help things. Ignoring the problems with reflections, missing out on that larger ambient occlusion does hurt the scene a lot. VXGI is already capable of producing results that have it, ideally it would also work for skylights.
For an example, attached is an image of how things look now, if an object is inside a shadow. I have the skylight turned all the way up to 10 to exaggerate the effect a bit.
