SEGI (Fully Dynamic Global Illumination)

Danger is his (and my) middle name.

 

Awesome.... I'll send it in a PM in a mo.

Fiddling with the emissives still.... Got a material shader that writes the emission maps to the gbuffer now..... Which the GI can read without having to do an extra render pass.... So that's a plus, also. I figure that will be easy enough for people to be able to add support to their custom shader. How to handle on the GI side, I'm still undecided... the voxelizer seems to handle emissives badly..... Regular lights fine.. emissives, huge smeary mess... So I'm tempted to pathtrace the indirect.... And pass the emissives off to RSM and mux both pathways in the final blit. That'll give up emissives that pop alongside the super smooth tracing that's going on.

 

I'm adding an example, emissive writing out shader to the bundle... that's based on cat like codings spherical harmonic shader. It's a one line modification. So should be easy enough to figure out.... I'll use that mechanism for picking any none unity light related lighting.... So people can just feed anything they like into it.

 

For me SEGI performance on DX11 is a lot better than DX12! is that normal?

 

Interesting... I'd not tried it with DX12... But I'd say that shouldn't be normal. I'll add it to my list of things to test against.

 

As I'm sometimes pretty chatty, and I'm working on my own from mostly the ground floor frankenGI that's closely related but not entirely SEGI.... I've added a GI channel to my ghost town of a Discord. So if you'd like to be closer to the metal or just chat about GI related schenanigans https://discord.gg/RV4HUD

 

Just getting my dancing clothes...to dance!

Also, Nin, maybe add a link of your git under your profile so that it is easy to download.

 

Will do!

 

Hello! I would like to know, why lighting look so bad?
sonicether has very nice screenshots on first page.
Is that because low settings or something incorrect?

 

It's mostly because I suck tbh.

 

If it's any consolation.... My local experimental repo, while currently lacking sunlight injection is much closer

 

What, you seem to be so passionate about GI and graphics and that's the most important thing !
Learning stuff takes time, just don't give up !
I am probably even more passionate about GI than you, but i am so about character animation and programming as well, so i can't spend my whole time on 3D graphics. I will leave that to you
I don't actually care about SEGI that much than, " You be happy about reaching the goal of creating something that will make You happy in the GI world "

I tried creating Compute based lightmapper named POLM but i gave up cause i didn't study 3D graphics and i would need much more time on that, and i am passionate about game development in general not only on graphics.

 

Woo! Think I finally cracked what was baking my noodle in my experimental project.
I'll port it over to SEGI in the near future.

 

Looks much better than the earlier screens. Still a little weird bright patch on the ground to the right though?

 

*grumble* I want to participate lol but my time jave shrunken I still need to solve that hair shader first, I'm jelly pardon me

 

that is not true. You know that, right?

 

I know, right... It was mostly tongue in cheek.

 

I was wondering is it possible to use already baked voxel data from 3rd party software? Have anyone looked into VDB as voxelization library as it provides sparse voxel access?

 

If you mention a library always post a link

 

Ah sorry. This is the link: http://www.openvdb.org. Currently Houdini can convert geometry to VDBs and can export to the VDB format: https://www.sidefx.com/. If anyone think this might be a viable solution let me know and I can export you VDBs for testing.

 

Oh okay, when we talk about voxelization we are really talking about 3d textures, so if you can export to 3d texture format, or even in 2d slices, then it's compatible, but then not sure all necessary data will be there. The voxelization inject more than the geometry, it actually inject the light and occlusion data in a specific way, code commentary is available in previous post.

Edit:
Also currently no implemengtation of SEGI implement voxel octree or various similar hierarchical structure.

 

Also vdb don't seem gpu friendly, as in real time friendly

 

Hi Guys, new to segi and I want to thank everyone who is contributing. Unity desperately needs a good realtime gi solution . Right now I feel like Enscape is the only really solid production ready real time gi solution. Its quite amazing how fast and accurate it is. https://enscape3d.com/ I have used it and can attest to that. Note this is not unity, this is its own application aimed toward architectural visualization however all of the techniques are totally relevant and doable in unity.

Anyway the main thing is there is an interesting paper written on the inner workings of enscape.

https://gpuopen.com/deferred-path-tracing-enscape/

Im not a graphics engineer but I thought it might be useful for those who are furthering Segi, especially in how they seem to have gone away from cone tracing and seems they are doing some sort of psudo-differed path tracing? Is this fundamentally different than what segi is doing or are there crossovers? I would highly encourage you to download a copy of enscape and try it , its shockingly good and works on very large scenes.

I would love to hear your thoughts.

 

Right, enscape is really impressive in "Realtime" - GI (still needs a few frames to calculate).
Thanks for the link!

 

Yeah and it uses the same RadeonRays SKD as the GPU lightmapper - it is visible that it needs a little time to fully converge to final results but actually is really impressive
And this is without dedicated hardware acceleration for BVH construction and traversal like nVidia new GPUs.
I wonder if this is actually an unbised pathtracer !

 

Could you explain what "unbiased" means?
Not depending on special hardware e.g NVidia?

 

1. Unbiased means - no matter what algorithm you are using, as soon as it provides results which fit into the "Rendering Equation" it is considered unbiased. Pure ( or brute force ) PathTracing is an unbiased algorithm because it does implement the equation directly and produces the best results that match the real lighting behavior.
As soon as you start adding some tricks to speed up rendering, you have to be sure the final pixel will have the same value as the pure PathTracing, or otherwise it becomes a biased algorithm ( does not fully match the equation ) !
For example photonmapping is a biased algorithm.

2. As it uses RadeonRays, it would work on almost any hardware with OpenCL 1.2 support or even on CPUs if they added a fallback layer !
As i understand the new tensor cores in the new Turing card from nvidia help improve the BVH construction and traversal and maybe other stuff as well ( not really sure ) , but it's considered to have a dedicated hardware cores for raytracing. nVidia Turing cars seem to be quite impressive even though they receive a lot of hate, i think mainly because not many people currently can appreciate such product and i think this was a good step from nVidia !

AMD has no such dedicated cores for raytracing, that's why i was impressed how fast it renders - based on the promotional video

 

Great explanation, thanks!

 

Tensor core and the bvh accelerated part are two distinct features.

The tensor core are used in the AA solution they provide (it's a neural network upscaler that guess the right stuff given a tile input) it's basically just fp16 core because neural network is just a series of mad operation anyway.

EDIT:
Enscape is basically SEGI with a BVH instead of voxel, and the bvh is offline constructed.

 

A little teaser of my own GI I've been working on alongside SEGI (Using Lexis test scene)... Though it uses a little SEGI code, it's mostly built from the ground up and improves upon many of the problems that are hard to fix in SEGI without a major rewrite.

 

That looks nicer to me. It still seems too bright, but I don't see the major light bleed that SEGI can get.

 

The shadow power will be configurable... It can be as bright/dark as people like. It's just boosted for the screenshot so you can see what's going on in the image

 

Nice indeed! Perhaps a bit too much ambient lighting?

 

Starting from scratch sometimes is best choice !
Can you build this so we can run it and look around !?

 

It will be released under a dual licence.... Free for non-commercial use. So you'll be able to try it out free when it's ready

It's not in a state ready for a demo yet, however.

 

How is the performance of your new version compared to SEGI?

 

Much faster.... Depending on how far you crank up the settings of course... I can't give exact figures yet.. Because still in the heavy part of development. But it runs in VR on my GTX1060 with breathing room for the actual game.

 

Be sure to test with moving objects etc..., because this is one of the biggest issues !

 

Yeah... That's the downside of caching a lot of data between frames... You can trade performance for slower refresh period... But fast moving emission becomes a problem.... I'm getting round that by having a static function you can call from anywhere that will flush the cache and cause an immediate update..... Which is functionality I will also port to SEGI... I'm going to resume fixing SEGI, when I've perfected all the new stuff. So next time I update it, it will also be much improved upon it's current iteration.

 

Wow it looks so incredibly cleaner than SEGI. Will it support reflections aswell like SEGI?

 

Hello, I have not read the whole post because there are almost 50 pages, but is there any plan to keep this asset updated and continue its development improving it? Is anyone or a group doing that? It's a shame, because this was the only asset that allowed to have global illumination in runtime in Unity and since September of last year it is not updated.

Lexie's "HXGI Realtime Dynamic GI" is another possibility but has no plans to market it.

 

I've been making small fixes and updates.... And will continue to in the future... But aside from that.... I've come to realise that there are a lot of problems that cannot be fixed without a major rewrite... So I've been working on my own GI, which I expect to release at the end of the year... It outperforms SEGI already. And I plan to release under a duel license, where it's free for non-commercial use.

For comparison to SEGI.... It's now feature complete as shown in the below image. The only thing that won't likely happen is SEGI style reflections, and it's reflection pass it much more subtle. I'll be starting my own thread for this, very soon. So I don't continue to spam SEGI thread with my own work.

 

Good work, I would recommend not using the stats windows FPS, it isn't actually accurate at all. Make a little script that renders it out at the top of the screen or use other software such as Fraps (what i use) or steam overly to get the real FPS from the games window.

Looking forward to your forum post to follow your adventure.

 

Heh.... I just tend to have that thing open out of habbit.... For profiling I use the profiler, and watch my gpu utilization and do all the normal things

 

It is very good news, I will be aware of your work.

The "duel license" means that for non-commercial use it is free, but for commercial use I have to pay? If it is that, then it is very good, because I would like to have your asset for my project that I want to market.

 

haha, fair enough. I use it to for somethings as well. I make a habit to close that window when taking screen shots as a lot of people don't know how incorrect that fps counter is, I don't want people to get the wrong idea about the performance from unity's bunk window.

 

Yes, you are correct. And that would be fine.... As a 'starving artist' myself, I appreciate that finding money for sometimes essential to a project middlewares is a massive struggle..... Plus, other peoples happiness matters more to me than making money.

A possibly cheaky request.... But can I have permission to include your test scene as a demo scene in my project? I'd be happy to pay a little for your time in providing it, if that would be required

 

Those who are in a state of starvation are the developers of Unity that seek a global illumination in runtime with good performance for our games. Finish your asset and we will buy it en masse.

Cheer up! You and Lexie are doing a great job.

 

Of course you can use it/distribute it, I'll probably put together some better test scenes later on that you're also welcome to use. It would be great if there was some public unity scenes we could all use to compare GI results.

 

Oh man! GI is realy hard thing so you should't say such things!)
May be you need to take a step back and start you work on point when core visual is corret?
I think it difficult to fix such complex systems when you don't know what went wrong.