<div dir="ltr">Thanks for all the suggestions! I'll start by going into a bit more detail about what I am talking about, starting with light probes. <div><br></div><div>Historically, iirc the first light probes where physical ping pong balls and ball bearings placed in front of the camera on a film set to get an idea of what the diffuse and specular light looks like in the scene, so that the same lighting can be mapped onto CGI objects. The modern game equivalent is cubemaps: 90-degree square renders of the scene along each cardinal axis, processed into a series of mipmaps from perfectly reflective (no processing needed) to perfectly diffuse (90 degree blur applied). These cubemaps are baked at representative points in the level. Typically there is a dense grid of diffuse light probes, and a sparser grid of reflective probes (because they are much more detailed and thus require more memory). When the game is running, dynamic objects sample the nearest probes to match the lighting of the static objects as closely as possible.</div><div><br></div><div>Light probes are pretty easy to calculate in-engine by essentially just taking screenshots and applying blurs, so I'm not sure why I brought it up here really -- it would be a nice feature for anyone using BGE though.</div><div><br></div><div>The more difficult feature is directional lightmaps. Right now it seems that if you bake the lighting using cycles, it stores the results as a single RGB value at each texel. The diffuse and specular equations are already solved, and baked into the lightmap. This is fine if you're making a game that has no normal maps, or normal maps that are lower-resolution than the baked lightmap. Modern games typically have very high-resolution normal maps, however, so it's important to store some directional information about the light as well, so that the final diffuse and specular equations can be solved per-pixel in real-time. Basically, each texel in the lightmap needs to act like a light probe, storing the accumulated lighting to a low-res cubemap, spherical harmonics or even just a linked-list of incident photons including their color and direction.</div><div><br></div><div>This would be especially useful for game developers, but could also be useful for accelerating film rendering in certain situations. I'm guessing it wouldn't be super hard to implement, since the information is already calculated when the scene is rendered -- it's just a question of storing it.</div><div><br></div><div>-David</div><div><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Mar 12, 2015 at 8:14 AM, Marc Dion <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:marcdion1974@gmail.com" target="_blank">marcdion1974@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div><div><div>@ Derek, I think this does belong either here or there, but I think it does belong here just as much as there.<br><br></div>Without a Shadow Catcher BSDF, Cycles baking is not much use for normal Cycles rendering. At this point I think anything to do with baking is really only useful for game development. This means either BGE or external game engines hence ->Bf-gamedev.<br><br></div>Not sure migrating the topic over to another list changes much at this point, at least not without a definite plan of action regarding how Cycles should be modified/expanded. <br><br></div>A task/patch page created on <a href="http://developer.blender.org" target="_blank">developer.blender.org</a> should be a good place for details, progress, etc... something similar to the following by Lukas Stockner. -> <a href="https://developer.blender.org/T38401" target="_blank">https://developer.blender.org/T38401</a> (Well, maybe once there are solid details in place :)<br><div><div><br><br><br></div></div></div>
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