Large-Scale Global Illumination at Activision

In this talk, we’ll describe the key techniques behind the large-scale global illumination system in Activision. Part of the SIGGRAPH 2021 Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games course (advances.realtimerendering.com/).
We present a new precomputed lighting compression technique that enables high-performance and seamless reconstruction directly from the compressed lighting data. In addition, we’ll discuss visibility-based sampling of precomputed volumetric lighting and describe a practical method for computing constrained spherical harmonics representations.
Bio:
Ari Silvennoinen is a Fellow Software Engineer at Activision, where he works on graphics technology research and development. Prior to Activision, he obtained a master’s degree from the University of Helsinki and worked on graphics technology at Umbra Software and Remedy Entertainment. His main interests are in global illumination, visibility algorithms and real-time rendering and he has contributions in graphics conferences and journals, including SIGGRAPH, I3D, CGF and EGSR.

[@ApocDevTeam]

I still remember baking lighting in a command prompt for custom maps in Call of Duty 1. Good old Radiant days.

[@jsmdnq]

It's quite amazing how far things have come.

[@Kairosdex]

Awesome learned so much!

[@djmips]

Good talk - the change of basis to apply simple constraints in the spatial domain is simple but the details are clever and a bit mind blowing. And finally, the compression of 44:1 with little loss of detail was amazing. That's one where I'll need to read the papers. Could that technique also apply to image compression ? I wonder how it would perform.

[@syntaxed2]

1.5gb is a memory problem? I would gladly pay 8gb memory requirement for those tasty tasty shadows and indirect lighting.

[@vasyapupken]

why shoot many visibility rays from sample point in all directions instead of just one towards camera ?

[@cory99998]

bounce light?

[@LouSaydus]

indirect lighting can only be computed if light bounces are taken into account.

[@clonkex]

Light leaking. If you don't calculate visibility in many directions you get light leaking through thin walls and so on.