Global illumination with rays

Unity Engine
1

hi people! I just want to share my poor (but OK) global illumination method

what do you think? , I only use the CPU (i think so), but I want to mix the GPU (don’t know how:()

2

That looks very impressive actually.

3

thanks! the big problem is the same method for the sun (with many parallel rays),the fps is too low. I need a culling system for the lights, with the spot (5-10 lights) there is no problem

4

I like it too - very simple and good looking approach. I think Half-Life² used a similar approach for some sort of fake GI/Rim Lighting on the characters, just with one ray picking a color from the ground on the left side of the character - if a character stands next to a red soda can (for example in the Nova Prospect level), you can see the character suddenly getting a red rim lighting… once it moves a few pixel forward, it changes to the “normal” ground color again.

5-10 lights sounds pretty expensive though, have you checked how it looks if you just take the color values, create a mean value out of them and use that color value for just one light (or two, with 2-3 rays each)? Of course this is extremely imprecise but it should run like butter in comparison and might look not that bad.

5

Look great :slight_smile:

6

Hi, when you say “take the color values” , you mean shaders? in this case i used 4 or 6 lights (I don´t remember) with cast shadows for each one, without shadows the performance increases a lot :wink:

I have a poor knowledge of the graphics part of c# (color, buffers, rendertexture, Gl, etc)

7

Are you still developing this ??? The first result are really nice, paralelism would give great performance! Maybe can find someone to help you get this done:!: Real-time GI would be really worth it :grin:

8

Hi, awesome, this is just what i need, please please please share some source code :slight_smile: