VOXEL LIGHTMAPS IN S2ENGINE HD 2019.1.6

Hi guys,

Today I would like to announce that I've implemented a new cool rendering feature for the upcoming 2019.1.6 version of S2ENGINE HD: I called it "Voxel Lightmaps".

Pratically you can instantiate, inside a scene, a volume covering a given area and telling s2engine to pre-compute lighting (for now only ambient occlusion) in that volume: the results are stored into a 3d texture.


There are a lot of other interesting features with this technique:

• Voxel Lightmap volumes can be attached to an object, this means that you can compute lighting in a volume around an isolated object and subsequently move/rotate/scale duplicate it together with the object and the lighting will change accordingly around it.
  
• Voxel lightmaps can overlap, this means that you can create a voxel lightmap for an object or a set of objects and than apply this on another voxel lightmap built around an entire level sectioin.
  
• Voxel lightmaps are FAST. After precomputing a voxel lightmap requires only a read into a 3d texture to be rendered. Every voxel lightmap is deferred, just like a light, but much more cheap.
  
• Voxel Lightmaps are as all other objects, they can be disabled basing on distance from camera
  
• Voxel lightmaps are progressive, this mean the lightmapper store the results of previous precomputing and use them to add samples to subsequent computing requests. You can refine pre-computing calculus every time you want :)
  

There are a lot of advantage over the traditional lightmap method:

• Traditional lightmaps require UV mapping on a second UV channel, Voxel Lightmaps NO
  
• Traditional lightmaps are completely static, Voxel Lightmaps can be attached to an object and moved and rotated together with it affecting surrounding environment accordingly.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeHazUXj8B4&feature=youtu.be
  
• Traditional lightmaps doesn't affect dynamic objects, Voxel Lightmaps are volumetric, this means that they affect the lighting of all the objects inside their volume, also dynamic.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsIALjOsRxQ&feature=youtu.be
  

Voxel Lightmaps are useful for simulating mid-high range ambient occlusion, this means that they can be mixed with SSAO for covering also micro details.

They do not require a big resolution due to low-frequency nature of ambient occlusion they simulate, also they can be instanced so you can reuse the same voxel lightmap on different object with same model but different rotation, position and scaling, in this way you can keep memory requirements low.

In any case the next step will be to find a way for compressing the voxels (sparse voxel octree?) in favour of a finer resolution.

Following are some screenshots showing the benefits of Voxel lightmaps. Framerate is the same with and without voxel lightmaps :)

A complete tutorial about how to use Voxel Lightmaps is coming soon.
Enjoy and stay tuned!
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