I’m working on a project that is a mostly-static “experience” sort of thing. IE, the user has freedom to move around but we only rarely update lighting/geometry/materials. VXGI has been amazing, and we are absolutely shipping with it (we control the hardware). My understanding of VXGI is far from complete, but I’m hoping to increase performance and had a couple of ideas…
Since we only update things that affect lighting rarely, it seems like we could decouple some of the heavy lifting. Page 26 mentions using arbitrary shaders for building lightmaps. Has anyone experimented with in UE4? Rather than baking with lightmass, we could do a fairly quick re-bake whenever we want to at runtime.
But what about something simpler- could we split the VXGI pipeline so that we only run parts when lighting needs to be updated? Would even give a meaningful performance improvement?
My background is mostly computer vision and CUDA, so a lot of the is really unfamiliar territory for me.