Real-time Global Illumination and Subdivision Surfaces

Ok, this is the neatest thing since slice bread and David, you can license this for the Unity engine!

Check it out: http://www.fantasylab.com (click on the ork on the bottom of the page).

No more worries about lightmaps, shadow casters ... sigh...

Cheers,
Paul Mikulecky
Lost Pencil Animation Studios Inc.
http://www.lostpencil.com

"The art of character animation is to try
to catch lightning in a bottle.... one volt
at a time." Brad Bird

 

How does rendering scale with objects and light sources? It looks like it will be viable for outdoor scenes where you might want skybox illumination but what if ... for example ... spell effects are light sources?

From your site:

"An NVIDIA® GeForce™ Go 7900 GTX calculates the global illumination solution (light bouncing to convergence) for the scene in these clips above in about 3.3 milliseconds (300 frames per second) per frame. That’s very fast, but still not fast enough to re-compute the illumination for every surface in a entire game world in real-time. Fortunately, the global illumination results are very compact. They can be cached for regions where lighting and geometry are static all global illumination data does not need to re-computed each frame."

 

Hey folks, first it's not my tool so I don't have all the details, but I have been talking with the owner. The best thing is to use the contact information on their site to get more specifics.

NeAraz, you are very perceptive. Mike, the owner of the engine wrote chapter 14 of the Gems 2 article. This is what he emailed me regarding the Gem articles and the current version of his engine:

"There are siginificant differences between what the engine can do and the chapters I wrote for GPU Gems. My GI technique works with normal and displacment surfaces, it supports specular material properties, and it does not require multiple passes like the ambient occlusion/indirect lighting technique. My new subd code is much more efficient with displacement mapped surfaces and it supports quads and triangles, not just quads."

Cheers,
Paul Mikulecky
Lost Pencil Animation Studios Inc.
http://www.lostpencil.com

"The art of character animation is to try
to catch lightning in a bottle.... one volt
at a time." Brad Bird

 

very perceptive NeARAZ. I am the Fantasy Engine Designer and the author of the two chapters in GPU Gems 2 you mention.

Although I was happy with the techniques described in GPU Gems 2, my new stuff is *much* better. First of all the two techniques I describe in the book cannot be used together since the ambient occlusion algorithm does not support normal mapped surfaces . (I'm actually surprised people did not complain about that)

I did not consider the indirect lighting technique in GPU Gems 2 to be global illumination because it could only support diffuse (non-shiny) materials. Also it required multiple passes to add shadows and bounces of indirect light. I solve everthing at once now.

The subd code is greatly improved too. It supports triangles and is much more efficient when displacement mapping.

 

Yah... what Mike said!

 

Good question podperson

First of all, in a GI system any object is basically the same as an area light source since light can come from it - reflected or emitted does not make any difference.

So does the system scale well with the number of objects? Yes it does. It is not an n squared algorithm even if all objects are dynamic. Static geometry is handled in constant time, and it supports portals so that very large levels can be handled efficiently.