I made an empirical test with a 100% diffuse sphere and manually tweak the
lighting power of a sun lamp trying to fit cycles and eevee the best I can.
Then I plotted the result and found a rough fit to the equation and that
seems to work pretty well.
The implementation is pretty straightforward.
In Cycles, sampling the shapes is currently done w.r.t. area instead of solid angle.
There is a paper on solid angle sampling for disks [1], but the described algorithm is based on
simply sampling the enclosing square and rejecting samples outside of the disk, which is not exactly
great for Cycles' RNG (we'd need to setup a LCG for the repeated sampling) and for GPU divergence.
Even worse, the algorithm is only defined for disks. For ellipses, the basic idea still works, but a
way to analytically calculate the solid angle is required. This is technically possible [2], but the
calculation is extremely complex and still requires a lookup table for the Heuman Lambda function.
Therefore, I've decided to not implement that for now, we could still look into it later on.
In Eevee, the code uses the existing ltc_evaluate_disk to implement the lighting calculations.
[1]: "Solid Angle Sampling of Disk and Cylinder Lights"
[2]: "Analytical solution for the solid angle subtended at any point by an ellipse via a point source radiation vector potential"
Reviewers: sergey, brecht, fclem
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D3171
This is an optimization / cleanup commit.
The use of a global ubo remove lots of uniform lookups and only transfert data when needed.
Lots of renaming for more consistent codestyle.
This augment the existing irradiance grid with a new visibility precomputation.
We store a small shadowmap for each grid sample so that light does not leak through walls and such.
The visibility parameter are similar to the one used by the Variance Shadow Map for point lights.
Technical details:
We store the visibility in the same texture (array) as the irradiance itself (in order to reduce the number of sampler).
But the irradiance and the visibility are not the same data so we must encode them in order to use the same texture format.
We use RGBA8 normalized texture and encode irradiance as RGBE (shared exponent).
Using RGBE encoding instead of R11_G11_B10 may lead to some lighting changes, but quality seems to be nearly the same in my test cases.
Using full RGBA16/32F maybe a future option but that will require much more memory and reduce the perf significantly.
Visibility moments (VSM) are encoded as 16bits fixed point precision using a special range. This seems to retain enough precision for the needs.
Also interpolation does not seems to be big problem (even though it's incorrect).
The system now uses several 3D textures in order to decouple every steps of the volumetric rendering.
See https://www.ea.com/frostbite/news/physically-based-unified-volumetric-rendering-in-frostbite for more details.
On the technical side, instead of using a compute shader to populate the 3D textures we use layered rendering with a geometry shader to render 1 fullscreen triangle per 3D texture slice.
