Global illumination is the next step in realtime lighting. I’ve seen it popping up more and more, and now I’m wondering if we’ll ever see this in a future version.
Crytek’s implementation isn’t particularly good, but they’ll probably be the first people that will actually use it in a published title. I know that CCP have licensed Geomerics’ Enlighten for their Dust 514 game. That’s interesting because I think it’s going to be a console game. Lightsprint is awesome, too, they’ve licensed it to a bunch of people, but… no released titles yet. I wouldn’t see any of this making its way into Unity any time soon. The closest you’re going to get will be shader effects that approximate the effect.
I’m impressed by Crytek’s “everything is realtime” and crysis 2 will be on consoles.
Dust does look great though.
I think the best way to tell how good the GI is to see some almost architectural visualization like stuff, like the room scenes in the GI crysis demo I posted.
I never trust first release trailers, some of the stuff might need to get cut, or the quality of stuff lowered.
There’s another method “Multi-Image Based Photon Tracing” that looks promising, and performance is not too bad. I think we’ll see it in future versions. In the meantime I’d like to experiment with setting up some of the methods in Unity. There’s enough documentation out there to accomplish this, just need to find the time!
http://cgcad.thss.tsinghua.edu.cn/interactive-photon-tracing/