Elite Dangerous Horizons is doing something along these lines of baking shadows to virtual textures for its planetary surfaces. Its specific to distant shadows though. Geometry is also generated and baked. If you are viewing the whole planet, it's just a single big texture. It's pretty clever.I just got to ask the stupid question:
Why did we ever ditch baked shadow maps in favor of screen space ambient occlusion effects?
I get that screen space effects are mostly unavoidable when we want to get the specular components right (are they really?).
For the diffuse component however, I feel we still haven't reached the same level of realism we originally had with plain prebaked shadowmaps. Especially not in games where these were actually computed with a global lightning model, or which correctly computed multiple refractions.
So why did we stop using a shadow map? Just because it was static?
Wouldn't have the logic consequence then been to make the materials dynamic instead, updating the shadow textures at runtime?
We DO have the virtual texturing techniques needed for that nowadays. There is no need to keep the shadow maps for the whole scene, respectively at full resolution. Only for the objects actually seen in screen space, as well in lower resolution for the nearby (or otherwise in terms of lightning significant) level geometry.
Evicted textures can be easily recreated by stochastic path tracers rendering to and sampling from the textures.
I guess you mean lightmaps, right? because ShadowMaps are very much alive...I just got to ask the stupid question:
Why did we ever ditch baked shadow maps in favor of screen space ambient occlusion effects?
I get that screen space effects are mostly unavoidable when we want to get the specular components right (are they really?).
For the diffuse component however, I feel we still haven't reached the same level of realism we originally had with plain prebaked shadowmaps. Especially not in games where these were actually computed with a global lightning model, or which correctly computed multiple refractions.
So why did we stop using a shadow map? Just because it was static?
Wouldn't have the logic consequence then been to make the materials dynamic instead, updating the shadow textures at runtime?
We DO have the virtual texturing techniques needed for that nowadays. There is no need to keep the shadow maps for the whole scene, respectively at full resolution. Only for the objects actually seen in screen space, as well in lower resolution for the nearby (or otherwise in terms of lightning significant) level geometry.
Evicted textures can be easily recreated by stochastic path tracers rendering to and sampling from the textures.
I just got to ask the stupid question:
Why did we ever ditch baked shadow maps in favor of screen space ambient occlusion effects?
So why did we stop using a shadow map? Just because it was static?
Wouldn't have the logic consequence then been to make the materials dynamic instead, updating the shadow textures at runtime?
Usually map is meant for pre processed/static and buffer is used for dynamic, shadow maps should be called shadow buffersI guess you mean lightmaps, right? because ShadowMaps are very much alive...
pbuffers :3Usually map is meant for pre processed/static and buffer is used for dynamic, shadow maps should be called shadow buffers
I just got to ask the stupid question:
Why did we ever ditch baked shadow maps in favor of screen space ambient occlusion effects?
But, if by "baked shadow map" we mean a baked lightmap that includes direct lighting (which might have been what Ext3h meant), the two are intertwined, and in some cases it can be problematic to have both the lightmap and AO since there's redundancy.Shadowing is dependent on lighting direction. It is basically all the surfaces that are occluded from the point of view of one single directional light source.
Ambient occlusion basically defines the visibility of a surface point from the entire environment. 'Proper' AO is only used to modulate indirect lighting coming from the entire environment, and it is completely ignored for directional light sources.
So the two are actually completely different things.
I followed the link you post. On the first QB sequence I think you got the images backward. On the first image he is further away in the tunnel, thus receiving the green light, in the second one he's closer to the pillar so the light would indeed not illuminate completely his jacket.The tech showcased by Dice in SIGGRAPH, Stochastic Screen Space Reflections, still has a long way to go imo. Gifs from that video(errors = red):
This approach is especially problematic when you have characters or movable assets interacting in screen space. And that's why i asked about SSR usage in Uncharted 4 in this post, but maybe i'm missing something.
Just look at 2:20-2:23
I followed the link you post. On the first QB sequence I think you got the images backward. On the first image he is further away in the tunnel, thus receiving the green light, in the second one he's closer to the pillar so the light would indeed not illuminate completely his jacket.