Yes, you can skip simulating GI with many small lights. Not a game dev, I work in animation. Up until fifteen years ago this was still a regularly taken approach to lighting scenes, before the advent of pathtracers
Comment on Anon turns on raytracing
stom@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks agoThere is absolutely nothing about raytracing which makes it “easier” for devs compared to a traditional render pipeline.
The extra performance rquirements alone mean you’re going to be doing more work elsewhere to make up for it, and that’s ignoring the current bugs/quirks with RT in whatever engine you’re using.
Hadriscus@jlai.lu 4 weeks ago
steeznson@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I thought the ultimate goal was to encapsulate the lighting system entirely inside the engine to stop programmers/artists needing to micro manage light sources. Presumably if a game only supported ray tracing then they could interact with an environment at the object level and trust the lighting would work in a life-like manner without having to be confected as part of development.
stom@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
trust the lighting would work in a life-like manner
Ah we’ve had raytracing for a long time already, and you can download something like Blender and play around with it yourself. You’ll quickly discover that just because it conforms to some real-world principles (and works in a reliable manner) doesn’t mean it’s a magic tool that Just Works and immediately makes anything look good.
You still have to setup your world lighting (point/sun lights, skyboxes, emissive materials, whatever), adjust it to get the look you want, and your hardware requirement for testing this are now increased.
Raytracing is nice because it can make things look even better, not because it replaces parts of the workflow.
steeznson@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
you still need to setup your world lighting
That was the locus of my misunderstanding. Thanks for explaining!
EddoWagt@feddit.nl 4 weeks ago
No worries, we got upscaling and frame generation now!