Radiance Cascades Rendered Directly 

How ya'll folks found this video? I'm seeing a lot of half-life themed visitors coming from somewhere, and I've no idea where from.

Gordon doesn't need to hear all of this, he's a highly trained professional.

My dumbass thinking this was a half life video

Never change your mic. It's somehow almost perfect

I never thought I'd live to see a radiance cascade

this is a sickass way to render cosmic shadow people

One thing that I forgot to mention in the video is the, um, sparkles? These are path tracing fireflies that made their way into radiance fields -- they go away the more time you give path tracing to converge, but I did not bother waiting more than half an hour and I thought they look kind on cool anyway. They don't exist while using this data structure for calculating actual global illumination because it needs much lower resolution to be resolved and so it converges much faster.

The cascades look like the raw output from a light field camera! Very cool!

“Carmack doesn’t need to hear all this he’s a highly trained professional”

No idea what I've just listened to but the imagery is very fascinating.

My brain watching this and hearing how its done is doing the sparkly bits of the model. Thanks for the vid

This is the first time I have ever comprehended these, because everyone else basically just called it black box. Thank you!!!

Absolutely blown away by all of your work. Thank you for sharing!!

Thanks Alexander for you ExileCon presentation! It was a joy to watch and learn.

2 years ago I was experimenting with directional lightmaps, trying to achieve both diffuse and sharp specular lighting. I've been messing with "plenoptic textures" that look very similar to this demo. It's really interesting how one can come up with a similar concept while trying to achieve different goal. The whole idea with the cascades and usage of this technique to calculate screen space global illuminance.... Just wow!

Absolutely gorgeous rendering

like a digital hologram. crazy that this has been doable for such a long time and only now has been found. And just by someone on yt.

Subbed - found your channel via the SimonDev video on radiance cascades then your ExileCon video :)

As Wave Function Collapse terrain generation has proven, cool names inspired on physics are generally better for game development.

The halflife refs are clearly due to your phenomenal HL voice and production quality

im so confuseddddd BUT THAT LOOKS cool and i love seeing new stuff!!!

just think how this could replace individual props like tables in corners or show massive events like large cut scenes or animated backgrounds. I also think it will work very well as a way to manage surface texturing.

Nice video, and great explanation of the cross-sections and their relationship to the spatial and angular resolutions!

This is amazing!!!!! Really excited to see what comes out of this

It came from recommendations and I have no idea what this is. But it's damn cool! Now I'll go deeper that rabbit hole to find out what it is and how you managed to make it work

Awesome stuff, well explained.

How.. illuminating. Very cool.

This is very reminiscent of lightfield rendering (originally "image based rendering" 20 years ago) of the sort that OTOY and Lytro were working on a decade ago, except here you have multiple resolutions for multiple depths? I'll have to look at your paper to understand the cascade aspect.

Looks pretty! If it's too memory intense i can imagine it being used sparingly, like for smoke grenade or effects on weapons

such a cool technique

Super cool! Show us what this same model looks like illuminated by the final technique!

babe wake up they just dropped virtual holograms

would you mind doing more of these? Not just for Cascade rendering, but in general. I quite appreciate your PoE presentations, and every time I rewatch them, I wish they gave you more time.

Really cool stuff man good work

Cool video (Game Dev)... YT sees my interest in "digital volumes" and recommended this.

This is cool!

so cool!!

this is so cool

yo this is really cool

Looks cool, will be interesting if nerfs could be baked in this cascade technique

A lot of similarities in the atlas to lightfield photography. Highly interesting work. Thank you!

digital hologram, finally great work! keep it up

this genuinely might change everything. good luck. I hope this actually pays off for you monetarily.

no idea what your talking about or what any of this means but, looks wicked cool dude

have you tried that with a billboard explosion? it may allow high speed rendering with some semi-3d effect.

Cool stuff! Needs more high quality examples

Does it mean that we can look into 3d models and see it more realistically from inside? Not like backfaces, but volume of it's mesh idk

how does the sampling work then with the cascades? can you also make a video on that? or is there a paper?

Hey Alex thanks for the video - Really cool to see a little more insight into this Radiance Cascades tech you've developed! Must be fun to play around with various little projects like this now that the tech has proven itself! How are you going with potentially open sourcing some form of it in the near future? Is it still a possibility? It seems like the only viable GI option for real-time procedural games like ARPGs or sim/management games, and, well I want to get my greedy little mitts on it! :D

Thanks for showing the atlas view. I'm curious why you chose parabolic encoding?

If you ever happen to have enough free time on your hands, I would love to have a video explanation for your radiance cascade for people who know not much about graphics programming :D SimonDev's Video was a good start for it tho, now I understand the things you do a bit more. Very fascinating. I still can't really imagine what those probes look like. As far as I understand now it sounds like you have those probes with different properties in the whole... err.. view? volume? of the camera and they are scanning everything and sending the averaged data to the camera and this is what you see in the end?

The title sounds like a sleeper agent phrase haha

yea i dont know what any of this is but it looks cool

Cool research. So, does that mean the angle of view is quite limited? Does the quality degrades with the "depth" of the object from camera?

Totally a coincidence that it looks like a interdimensional ghost celebrating cico de mayo.

neat!!!!!

Never seen radiance fields rendered so fast - on the cpu, too!quick q - do you have angular resolution inconsistencies at different layers due to how the resolution changes at each depth layer?

hell yeah

Interesting effect, somewhat like glitter immersed in plastic. How much memory does this demo use? Seems too resource intensive for complex real-time scenes.

so its like deep shadow maps but for irradiance?

So from what I understand from this and the presentation, you take an array of textures, and for each pixel in that texture, look at it's 8 neighbors, and do some short distance (1px) raytracing, and repeat that for the number of cascades you have? Then to get the final value, you read the pixels in the final cascade for the direction you want to trace in? Wouldn't this make it O(n) for the number of cascades instead of having some fixed upper bound?

Your mention of the accuracy of penumbras makes me wonder if this same technique could be modified in the calculation of radiation dose calculation in radiation therapy. Basically we do a bunch of complex ray tracing or kernel convolutions to perform dose calculations in radiation therapy and calculate the interactions based on a fluence maps from particular angles. For us however reflectivity isn't so important. Mostly we just have attenuation (simple calculation), and a couple different types of scattering interactions (much more complex requiring monte carlo interactions). However, our accuracy in dose calculation tends to decrease at the edge of beams (at the penumbra) as the calculation becomes most difficult there with scattering interactions beginning to dominate over the attenuation interactions.

i'm curious, would this help with more realistic sun sparkles on a body of water?

Sparkles

the profiler is legit. 👍

cool

so basically you bake point clouds to an atlas of cube maps and use it to render imposter pixels

thank you for the video...veeery impresive.... please upgrade your mic

yeah

Great video, thank you. Please upgrade your microphone!

cool, this is a super cool video (not understanding one thing)

Can you share those 8k images you have used in this demo for people who want to reproduce this (without having to capture their own scene first), or could you even upload the entire demo code somewhere?

How do you style ImGui like that? Is there a theme or did you manually change backgrounds and border radius?

Damn, what mic are You using? It sounds rad af. I seriously wanna know P.S. Why do i have a feeling that i'm close to being the only one who came here *not* because i thought the video is somehow involved with half-life?:D

Looks great! But it is hard to understand how it works. As i understand this, you just render the scene into a tiny cubemap for each point on a regular grid. You have 4 variants of this grid (cascades) - from less detail (spatial) to more detail, less detail grid contains more detail cubemaps, more detail grid contains less detail cubemaps. It is still unclear for me how fetching and mixing from these arrays of cubemaps works.

It's funny i do something like that to render gi on mali 400 gpu in real time lol, but instead of storing the results, i store the uv of the points, which allows real time updates by simply texture feedback, ie the texture samples itself to resolve gi. I had the cascade idea but didn't implemented it, i didn't knew it would be that efficient. It's on unity's forum under the name exploration of custom diffise rtgi, the technique is called MAGIC for mapping approximation of gi compute 😂. I resolve slowly because i haven't tested how much i can render per frame, so it's one ray per pixel per frame, my computer is dead now lol hasn't finished.

This is why computers were built.

is that gauss splattering?

Bro sounds like Posy

Is there a paper or something?

ничего не понял, но очень интересно =)

So what would be the usecase of this?

Ah! So there’s no sphere harmonics, you used cube maps. Still seems like a trickery. I’m looking forward for the paper. Really, O(1) looks like magic.

Оп, оказывается это был тизер affliction в PoE)

I'm still a bit too stupid to understand but I will keep trying until I implement it

Could you please explain it all in a fortnite terms?

IT'S A HOLIGRAM!!!!!

Нихуя не понял, но очень интересно)

A digital hologram.

Ghost skeletons

mirrors

wheres the siggraph paper my man. im tryna read that!!!

Half-Life + Hollow Knight = Radiance Cascade

0:07 global elimination technique 💀

you didnt even touch the roughness slider :( please, go into more tehcnical detail about how this works ! graphics programmer in me is amazed

Please, source code github link :)

Audio is pretty bad. You need to compress.

Saw this video on my homepage recommendations, no relation to Half-life at all (haven't looked at source/half-life content in forever). To be honest I have no clue what this even means, but I'm very intrigued and I often enjoy watching people passionately explain something that to me is very niche. Thank you for sharing!

It’s not “the way they look like.” It’s just “the way they look.”

Make a fork of blender and try to implement it in blender !