Ultimate lighting solution?

[omaremad]

Allot of irrlichters are creating deffered renderers for easier lightmangement, I have an idea which would provide realtime radiosity utlising deffered lighting (no.. not post process ssao GI, that wastes fill rate and ignores off screen light bounces).

The requirements are the following:
-deffered rendering engine
-static mesh with lightmap coordinates(i.e: unique mapping of all the texels)
-CPU side calculation of light at "map sensors"

map sensors are points on the map where direct lighting is estimated with the cpu then a virtual light is sent to the defferd rendering system to bounce the light.



So the render sequence would be
========CPU===========
///precalculation, create map sensors and find out surface diffuse colour at location

/////loop/////
calculate light intensity at each map sensor
multiply with precalculated surface diffuse
create deffered virtual lights
========GPU===========
render normal lights
render virtual lights

This technique is similar to the technique called "light splatting" except its not post process and thus takes into account off screen lightbounces.

Code that works out the sensor positions and surface colour is already part of my gpurad application, the diffrence is this maybe possible to do in realtime since its rendering in a deffered system rather than to a light map

Anyone intrested in doing this on their deffered engine?

[BlindSide]

You're crazy! .. jk carry on, carry on

[3DModelerMan]

Have you heard of deffered instant radiosity? That can be done at ~50fps.

[ent1ty]

Whoa BlindSide who are you

[ChaiRuiPeng]

blindside i have heard so much about you

[ent1ty]

Yes... doesn't brush his teeth, couldn't tell A from Z and.. impotent, they say

[fmx]

LOL, I'd show more respect to admins if I were you
...but still

@omaremad
interesting idea, so the light "map sensors" are supposed to be manually placed during environment/level creation, or are you suggesting procedural generation and placement of the sensors at load-time?

[REDDemon]

You can do even better. how this will work with heightmaps for realistic surfaces? i wanna see a screen shot where the lighted item is also heightmapped/normal mapped.

[ent1ty]

LOL, I'd show more respect to admins if I were you
...but still

I think that irrlicht devs are non-stupid people, who can see that I am joking

Anyway, i have though about this, and come up with a (perhaps even crazier) solution: global illumination as a post processing effect. You use pixel positions to calculate the distance between the current pixel and the surrounding ones and perhaps also normals in order to have lighted only the areas that a visible amount of reflected light hits. You could then stack this effect multiple times to have multiple passes. Crazy or not crazy?

[omaremad]

The whole point is not to do it in post process... so you can take into account offscreen lighting.

I tried to work an example using sudis deffered system but it always seems to segfault even with his own example code , im also too lazy to make a whole new deffred system.

[ent1ty]

Ah. I didn't know that GI is generally done as a post processing effect.

If you want, you can try it with my deferred thingy, but it's in alpha state. Supports all kinds of lights and basic post processing system https://bitbucket.org/entity/irrrenderer