[Shadow Filtering]

It looks like I overlooked the performance cost of blurring the shadow image. The jury is still out on whether the compute shader with imageStore() is faster than a fragment shader, but I think VSMs are going to be the high-quality option. Regular depth shadow maps have almost no performance cost on low-end hardware but don't look as nice.

The final scene render for VSMs is in fact faster, so if the shadow is static the VSM becomes faster, but redrawing a variance shadow map incurs a pretty significant cost, on low-end hardware at least.

[Shadow Filtering]

The array might be unnecessary if the texture cache is already providing the same functionality. Still testing this, I am not getting good performance with imageStore() in a compute shader right now.

[Finalizing Shaders and Real-time Global Illumination Progress]

SSAO in Ultra is a lot cleaner. I used a denoise filter to smooth the results:

[Finalizing Shaders and Real-time Global Illumination Progress]

5 hours ago, Genebris said:

So the problem is not just moving objects affecting GI but even moving objects receiving GI from static objects?

My inspiration came and I thought of a clever solution.

[Multiple Light Bounces]

Finally getting the kind of results I was hoping for

[Ultra Engine Benchmarks Revealed - 10x Faster than Unity, Leadwerks]

4 hours ago, Genebris said:

Well, Unity or Leadwerks don't even have realtime GI systems so it's hard to compare.

Apparently, Unreal's GI is too slow for VR.

[Ultra Engine Benchmarks Revealed - 10x Faster than Unity, Leadwerks]

15 minutes ago, IceBurger said:

Is this still true with all the lighting development you have been doing?

I have not done any benchmarks yet of the GI system. I'm trying to make it very fast.

[Multiple Light Bounces]

Less stingy with the indirect light now, filling the room much better:

[Multiple Light Bounces]

Looking quite good now

[Multiple Light Bounces]

Yes!

There's no bloom in this shot:

[Multiple Light Bounces]

More metallic material settings make look more metal:

[Multiple Light Bounces]

5 minutes ago, Vida Marcell said:

oh, is there any chance you show me that?

And there is a 100% chance of that, because I already have. The default material above has metalness = 0 and roughness = 1.0.

[Multiple Light Bounces]

4 minutes ago, Vida Marcell said:

How soon will this work with pbr materials?

In zero seconds, because it already does.

[Real-time Global Illumination: Introducing Latency]

[Real-time Global Illumination: Introducing Latency]

This definitely looks more like high-quality GI than previous attempts:

 

[Real-time Global Illumination: Introducing Latency]

Initial results are promising:

[Real-time Global Illumination: Introducing Latency]

Here you can see one single ray working. A sharp image of the dragon appears on the wall, and the floor is visible reflected off the bottom of the dragon's jaw. This will be expanded into many rays for smooth diffuse GI:

Since I will only updating a little bit at a time each frame, instead of three large cone step rays I will be using many small ones, maybe 16 or 32. This is sort of halfway in between conventional path tracing and cone step tracing.

[Finalizing Direct Lighting]

2 hours ago, havenphillip said:

I mean initially you said the engine would be super fast. After all the things you've added is it what you had anticipated?

Yeah, of course. The only question is how much the specular reflection in the GI will cost, but that's something we did not have before at all.

[Finalizing Direct Lighting]

51 minutes ago, havenphillip said:

How is the engine speed after adding all that lighting and shadows?

Direct lighting is very fast. It has basically no impact. See page 10:
https://www.xcdsystem.com/iitsec/proceedings/index.cfm?Year=2021&CID=862&AbID=96809

[Voxel Cone Step Tracing Refinement]

1 hour ago, Marcousik said:

@Josh Any idea on an hypothetical "loading bar" on which prozent the ultra engine actually is, if 100% means the releasing state ?

85%

[Voxel Cone Step Tracing Refinement]

No, that is too expensive, I would never make money with that price.

[Voxel Cone Step Tracing Refinement]

3 minutes ago, Cromartie said:

ok)), and the license in steam?

I don't know if it will be on Steam.

[Voxel Cone Step Tracing Refinement]

8 minutes ago, Cromartie said:

Hi Josh, how much will the Ultra engine non steam license cost?

[Voxel Cone Step Tracing Refinement]

@MarcousikI have the reflectivity of all materials turned way up to make the reflections easily visible.

[Voxel Cone Step Tracing Refinement]

Well, we have reflections appearing on dynamic objects, no matter what. But making dynamic objects appear in reflections is what I mean.