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0 pointsovergard10y ago0 comments

> What a narrow minded view. There are data structures that can store geometry and lighting information in world space - for example you can have world represented by some sparse voxel data structure and calculate lighting in worlds space - then camera rendering is just raycasting in to the datastructure which is the same for all views. Animation and particles are about updating the world geometry.

That only works for diffuse lighting. There is more than diffuse lighting. I'm not "narrow minded", I actually work on renderers for a living so I know the actual data structures in use. Things like specular reflections and refractions are entirely dependent on where the viewer is; and calculating lighting information for an entire scene is way less efficient than calculating it for a viewer (see: how deferred renderers work).

> Unfortunately not a lot of research has been done because rendering 3D polygons fit the constraints we had historically and is really robust, everything is optimized towards it.

Huh? There's been decades of research into ray tracing and voxels. Believe me, people have put a lot of thought into how to optimize these things.

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moonchrome10y ago

>That only works for diffuse lighting.

You can add light ID list to the structure (eg. 1 or 2 ints with byte IDs or w/e) - essentially solving light occlusion problem in world space. You can then do view space specular and you do transparent objects as a separate pass just like you do with deferred.

>Things like specular reflections and refractions are entirely dependent on where the viewer is; and calculating lighting information for an entire scene is way less efficient than calculating it for a viewer (see: how deferred renderers work).

If you're rendering for a single view - my whole point is that if you're rendering for multiple clients then solving lighting world space makes that calculation shared just like gbuffer is an optimization for view space with it's own tradeoffs and workarounds.

>Huh? There's been decades of research into ray tracing and voxels. Believe me, people have put a lot of thought into how to optimize these things.

Compared to triangle rasterization it's nowhere near close - for eg. I've only seen a decent voxel skinning implementation a few years back - realtime is entirely based on it and it's baked in to the hardware pipeline.

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