Support for light probes separate from reflection probes
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Geenz Linden
As it stands, Second Life (secretly) supports global illumination via reflection probes. This is confusing to users - as we only really specify it as part of the reflection probe. In reality, there's often a need to have more light probes for GI than there is for reflection probes.
This change means that:
- Probes can have three modes. Reflection, light, or both
- Existing probes would be both for reasons of content compatibility
- Potentially, changing how we store light probe data (using spherical gaussians or spherical harmonics or some such)
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Cynos3D Resident
Do you think it would also be possible to add in something to also contain omnidirectional lights and keep them from bleeding though solids.. or at least the boundaries of a probe which could be easily masked into a wall to prevent bleeding.
It's quite difficult to light a traditional dwelling properly with sharply contrasting light colors between rooms without significant color bleed on walls and objects of nearby rooms as probes do not work on any light that is not a projector.
Crexon Resident
Cynos3D Resident that would be shadows, specially point light shadows which is possible but can get performance intense very fast. Maybe it might get done with a third party viewer but LL/Geenz has already confirmed that they LL will not be adding this.
Cynos3D Resident
Crexon ResidentThat's unfortunately not how shadows work at the moment. A point light present in one room will cast a visible reflection on surfaces in others, especially if they are in close proximity or they share a large surface such as a floor or walls, it is as if it was an entirely open space which makes it quite difficult to fully apply scene specific lighting in small environments without spacing things apart.
I'm not expecting a feature here and now, but this needs to be taken into account moving forward with PBR for proper scene dressing, to optimize light placement and to avoid having un-necessary draw calls from light sources that shouldn't be visible in a given scene.
This is time and time again the most frustrating element of lighting in SL which always discourages me from even bothering to attempt something intricate in a traditional dwelling with standard room sizes and placements in which its not possible to separate them with a teleporter door, it's very problematic if the whole point is to transition towards PBR, a shader model that REQUIRES local lighting to properly fill a global illumination volume and light scenes naturally.
Crexon Resident
Cynos3D Resident The vast majority of people do not have PCs powerful enough to run point light shadows. At least with the number of point lights around the grid in the scene.
Maybe we could do something like only do for the 2-4 closest lights to the camera. But LL had already said point light shadows arent coming. So it would be on a TPV to implement something like this so this separate request is better done on like the Firestorm or other viewers feature request.
Cynos3D Resident
Crexon ResidentAgain, the point's not about brute forcing shadows, my first suggestion was to use volumes to work around the issue with tools we already have, i'm not sure why the conversation keeps circling back to what we already know and what LL said. It's about figuring out an alternative to get the desired results and push our capabilities forward with as little added cost as possible. No one's going to care if it's cheating by restricting lights within their reflection probe / GI volume if it gets the job done.
BrittanyCash1985 Resident
idk how to vote, but I vote yes to this!!
Cynos3D Resident
BrittanyCash1985 ResidentPress the up arrow at the top left of the post
Zanibar Darkstone
Light probes are very seriously needed as there's many shapes that just aren't feasible to cover with the combo probes we have right now, at least not without image stability and performance penalties.
On the Land Impact side, I would strongly suggest finding a way to ignore probes from land impact calculations entirely as there are people who refuse to use them, solely because they eat into their limited Li allotments on parcels.
Jerrod Diavolo
Zanibar Darkstone I am sort of glad people don't use them outside on their land because the transition from no reflection probe coverage to reflection probe converage looks rather jarring, to the point that I derendered the ones on neighbors land.
Isabella Cinder
yes please. yes please. yes please. yes please. :)
Geenz Linden
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