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Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

godotengine.org

21–30 of 150 posts

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#21
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's anything naive about this take.. Why wouldn't a company like Epic, who is the dominant market player by far, put some funding into smaller open source research projects like this? Godot is no threat to them, and quite the contrary brings positive contributions to the whole industry. Not only is it good PR, but as they say a rising tide lifts all boats.

Not sure what market you mean, Unity has a larger marketshare. Can't find a good source for numbers but a lot of places are quoting that Unity has 48% of the total market and Unreal has 13%. Also not sure how this is being measured, but in my experience Unity is more popular.

Numbers are misleading here. I don't have any stats but I think Unreal games make more money.

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#22
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's anything naive about this take.. Why wouldn't a company like Epic, who is the dominant market player by far, put some funding into smaller open source research projects like this? Godot is no threat to them, and quite the contrary brings positive contributions to the whole industry. Not only is it good PR, but as they say a rising tide lifts all boats.

Not sure what market you mean, Unity has a larger marketshare. Can't find a good source for numbers but a lot of places are quoting that Unity has 48% of the total market and Unreal has 13%. Also not sure how this is being measured, but in my experience Unity is more popular.

Measured by number of games that might be true, but measured by players I'd wager it's not.

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#23

This is super interesting. The first video on the page sheds some light on how this actually works. It seems like they convert the scene into shapes that can be represented via SDF's and smooth min ( https://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/smin/smin.htm ) them to blend into an approximation of the actual scene. While also capturing some general texture color data to apply and blend into the shapes. I assume the shade…

> sheds some light

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#24

This is super interesting. The first video on the page sheds some light on how this actually works. It seems like they convert the scene into shapes that can be represented via SDF's and smooth min ( https://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/smin/smin.htm ) them to blend into an approximation of the actual scene. While also capturing some general texture color data to apply and blend into the shapes. I assume the shade…

They explicitly say in the article that it does not involve ray racing, of which ray marching is a subset.

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#25
post #2

> Tim Sweeney and Epic Games for their confidence in helping us finance our research via Epic Megagrant. That’s interesting. Since this is all open source I guess Epic could potentially benefit from this... It’s nice to see they funded another engine.

An engine like UE which has decades and decades of work does not care about what a small engine like Godot does.

The grant is more about avoiding monopoly claims, getting good PR and attacking Unity.

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#26

This looks really cool and impressive of course, but I still feel the easiest way for most indies (which Godot is aimed at) to stand out is to get away from photo-realism.

It's possible to have photo-realistic lighting without photo-realistic art. For example see the Link's Awakening remake: https://d1lss44hh2trtw.cloudfront.net/assets/editorial/2019/...

Even the Final Fantasy 7 Remake arguably doesn't have a photorealistic style. Everything is very exaggerated and it has a distinctive art style despite using very physical rendering

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#27

This is super interesting. The first video on the page sheds some light on how this actually works. It seems like they convert the scene into shapes that can be represented via SDF's and smooth min ( https://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/smin/smin.htm ) them to blend into an approximation of the actual scene. While also capturing some general texture color data to apply and blend into the shapes. I assume the shade…

They explicitly say in the article that it does not involve ray racing, of which ray marching is a subset.

It's possible that "it does not require ray tracing" means that it does not require extensions like RTX. Perhaps it uses voxel cone tracing, which you may say is technically not ray tracing, but if you called it ray tracing you wouldn't exactly be wrong either.

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#28

This looks really cool and impressive of course, but I still feel the easiest way for most indies (which Godot is aimed at) to stand out is to get away from photo-realism.

Outside of photorealism, realistic lighting can really help immerse people in the world.

Look at the quake RTX demo, there's something different about it compared to even a modern game with the approximated lighting.

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#29

This is super interesting. The first video on the page sheds some light on how this actually works. It seems like they convert the scene into shapes that can be represented via SDF's and smooth min ( https://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/smin/smin.htm ) them to blend into an approximation of the actual scene. While also capturing some general texture color data to apply and blend into the shapes. I assume the shade…

SDFs are computed on the GPU using a jump flood algorithm ( https://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~tants/jfa/i3d06.pdf ) from a series of voxels, storing color at each point.

From this, a regular grid of probes are placed and integrated using the data from the SDF, using ray-marching. Material shading reads from the probes.

Re: Godot 4.0 gets SDF based real-time global illumination

#30

This is super interesting. The first video on the page sheds some light on how this actually works. It seems like they convert the scene into shapes that can be represented via SDF's and smooth min ( https://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/smin/smin.htm ) them to blend into an approximation of the actual scene. While also capturing some general texture color data to apply and blend into the shapes. I assume the shade…

They explicitly say in the article that it does not involve ray racing, of which ray marching is a subset.

It ray-marches the SDF when integrating them into the probes. You can see that here: https://github.com/godotengine/godot/blob/481151be09108a3000...
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