TestHBIL

HBIL Demo

This is the HBIL technique demo project that offers a cheap but efficient way to add ambient occlusion and indirect lighting by exploiting the screen-space information at its maximum potential.

This near-field technique is an exact complement to the far-field indirect lighting offered by environment probes and, together, they should bring a lot of realism to your renderings.

You can read the details about the mathematical theory in the accompanying PDF paper: 2018 Mayaux - Horizon-Based Indirect Lighting (HBIL).pdf.

Below you can see what the technique can bring to the table, the little insets show what the direct lighting-only image should be instead:

Build

You pretty much need the entire GodComplex repository because the project relies on various image, rendering, math and tool libraries present in the framework.

• Open the Tests.sln solution file, preferably with Visual Studio 2019
• Choose the "Debug/Release" configuration and the "x64" platform
• Edit the project properties for all configurations/platforms and select the project's directory (i.e. the directory where this README.md file is standing) as runtime directory:
• Select the scene type in TestHBILForm.cs (e.g. #define SCENE_LIBRARY), by default it's set to the "Library" scene. Note that some scenes are 3D scenes that need to be downloaded and unpacked from various websites, refer to this example for more info.
• Build (F5 key)
• Run

Controls

If you're familiar with Maya or Unity cameras then my camera manipulator works the same way. Otherwise:

• No key pressed:

  • Left button = Orbit about target
  • Middle button = Pan both camera and target
  • Right button = Zoom in/out on target

• LShift pressed (first person view):

  • Left button = Forward/backward + look left/right
  • Middle button = Pan both camera and target
  • Right button = Look around

• LAlt pressed (Light control):

  • Left button = Rotate light direction (in scenes with ambient only, rotates the SH environment. In scenes with directional light, rotates the directional)
  • Middle button = NOTHING
  • Right button = NOTHING

• LControl pressed (Debug):

  • Any button = Attempts to read back buffers for debugging purpose. Crashes at the moment since it's been ages since I've used this tool.

Shortcut keys:

• SPACE = Toggles HBIL
• R = Reloads modified shaders
• A = Toggles reprojection matrix copy ON/OFF (used for debugging scene reprojection, otherwise it's quite useless)

Performance

When DirectX Debug layer is disabled, the technique runs at ~2.5ms @ 1280x720 on my GeForce 680GTX in the Crytek Sponza Atrium and pretty much any other scene (it's a screen-space technique after all).

There's also plenty of room for optimization, especially in the inner loop where I uselessly recompute the reprojection of normals and other direction vectors whereas it should be stored somewhere once and for all...

The reprojection steps can also be bypassed altogether: using the current frame's lighting only will give you a single bounce instead of theoretically an infinity of bounces, or you could attempt to re-use your temporal radiance history buffer as a source of radiance values. Although it's not completely correct to re-use a mix of diffuse+specular radiance, it doesn't really hamper the final integration of irradiance.

Issues

• Lots of noise! but I'm really not an expert with TAA so I'm only relying on a temporal reprojection routine I grabbed somewhere and that I don't really master. I think there's a lot of room for improvement on that end...
• AO is lacking precision due to large step sizes (i.e. we often cover the entire screen, gathering irradiance) whereas most AO details often stand close to the center point. Unfortunately, if we reduce step sizes then indirect lighting gets much poorer. We definitely need more samples here, but that's the core parameter driving the speed of the technique.
• No off-screen reflection. Obviously, since it's a screen-space technique. But that's where the far-field irradiance solution should intervene and compensate for this issue... HBIL alone is not a definitive solution to all indirect lighting problems.

Comments?

Contact me on Twitter for any suggestion, comment or bug report.