Realtime Dynamic GI + Reflections + AO + Emissive - AHR

[TAN]

@;380719

That screens made me want to play with that specific scene
Here’s a screen comparing reflection types:

http://i.imgur.com/OTsJmzZ.png

Actually there’s just a few things I want to do before asking Epic for integration, and that changes are
-Rewrite part of the tracing algorithm. Want to put it all in one pass, so that you can control the number of rays
-Improve tracing speed by using the binary grid properly, and not how it’s being used now
-Multiple bounces

When that things are done, it can be said that AHR is ready for integration with the main branch, as a WIP of course. I’ll ask Epic to join it to the main branch. I also want to ask them for an internship there, for next year. I belive I showed that I know what I’m doing, and if they actually want AHR into UE, who better that the guy that created it right ;D
Anyway, still need to do a lot of work. My goal is to have all that done by the end of the year, and also start working on the following “extra” items:
-Particles lighting
-Multiple bounces for reflection
-Improve tracing speed by treating the binary grid as an octree and doing a stackless traverse
-AHR based bake. The idea is to fire a secondary voxelization stage, trace, store that on a voxel grid, blur, and then compact it to a sparse octree. That way you get high quality bakes in seconds, and also you dont need to make lightmap UVs.

To answer your question directly, in 3-4 weeks I hope to have the first two things mostly covered up, so yeah, you can start with AHR.
On the other side, university is taking a toll on my free time ( it’s 0 currently tbh ), so that’s why development is so slow. I’m quite confident that with 8 hours per day dedication, and working on a team that knows the way around UE (cough cough aka working at Epic cough cough. Even if they are not actually working on AHR, having someone to ask a quick question about the engine saves so much time) AHR could be done in 2 - 3 months.

Some may ask why use AHR instead of VXGI for the main branch, and that’s a fair question. VXGI is more stable, and normally looks better. There are two main differences (currently, the particles and bake stuff would make it 4) one being the performance gap (AHR is still faster than VXGI, by a large margin depending on the settings. Specially specular tracing, that’s crazy slow on VXGI) and the other, and to my opinon the main one when it comes to integration, is that AHR is running directly in the engine, all the code is there and doesn’t rely on external libraries like gameworks. That makes it quite more flexible, as Epic can actually see what AHR is doing and improve from there.

So Epic knows how Epic is
[/QUOTE]

HOOOLY ****

**** YEAHS !!!

Way to go ! As an old saying goes "One step closer to victory ! "

I would really like to see you at Epic beating the **** out of tech. Also great to hear that it would be ready to use within 3-4 weeks. Hopefully I’ll make a good showcase out of your tech as a game.

Also please don’t forget my little wish; Realtime Sunshafts