Just wanted to give a quick update. Been waiting awhile to have everything working efficiently enough to focus on my AO generation. It wasn’t bad-ish before but it was sort of place holder with the intent on tweaking the calcs there after all the SDF management, culling and I guess now the clip map is done.
Anyways messed around this morning, and I mean it’s ao so got it working prettty good. Id say im basically done that part, everything is nice and smooth and the global SDF helps alooooot. Just a few screen where it’s at now. I find it’s miles better personally.
I also got bent normals looking pretty nice, it’s pretty cool what they do for the actual lighting calcs done by unity. Like take this point like in a forest for example.
The top image has the bent normals turned off. It’s pretty apparent that the light does not care that are trees blocking it’s path to surrounding objects. With them on though you get some nice light blockage for essentially free. So it’s not just toning them out it out naively using the AO magnitude calculated by the ray trace, it’s also adjusting the screen space normals to account for how surrounding objects would block light as well and using this when handling the differed lighting stuff.
I also made a short video of the all the effects in action pretty quick. Nothing special but figured something with directional light changing would show off everything together half a**'d pretty well. Been extremely busy on my end as a of late.
I personally love the shadow fading coming off mountains in the distance. That alone always makes me sooo happy. All objects use DF shadows cone traced against the instance, so shadows dont use the global SDF at all and should never need to. They run at like 1.3 ms even when viewing the entire terrain in the viewport.
The AO is on for the heightfield, instance cone tracing and global distance field, could have messed with the lighting and settings a bit better, but anywhoooo. Hope you guys enjoy ! <3
Edit; Dont mind the fidgetty-ness in the video. Capture software sucks and i was using a mouse pad lol.