Realtime Global Illumination

When creating large worlds or dynamic environments where lighting conditions are constantly changing (eg. because the time of day changes), you can use Realtime Global Illumination to render indirect light passing through the scene.

This documentation page explains how to use GI in your projects. It also includes some useful tips and tricks at the end.

Tutorial

To learn how to quickly set up Realtime Global Illumination see this tutorial.

Dynamic Diffuse Global Illumination

Dynamic Diffuse Global Illumination (DDGI) is an algorithm implemented in Flax to render dynamic global illumination with indirect lighting.

It uses light probes (world-space, automatically placed) to gather indirect lighting at a fixed location and then later sample it in materials (opaque, transparent and volumetric). To prevent light leaking, a common problem of light probe-based solutions, the DDGI algorithm renders a low-resolution depth buffer around each probe and applies the Chebyshev visibility weight.

DDGI probes are placed around the camera and are split into a series of cascades to cover the whole scene. When the camera moves though the scene, the probes are scrolled to maintain GI coverage. Far-scene outside the GI Distance uses a fallback probe with ambient irradiance from the sky.

DDGI Algorithm

Flax's implementation of the DDGI algorithm uses custom a Software Ray Tracing solution and an automatically scrolled probes volume with up to 4 cascades. Cascades closer to the camera are update more often compared to far cascades.

Probes use variable-ray count based on probe state and variance of the irradiance calculated during probe update. This allows scale down ray count to save on perf when nearby lighting has stabilized and doesn't fluctuate but when for example nearby objects are moving or changing color then ray count automaticallly increases to account for dynamic lighting response. Additionallly, to amortize potential noise artifacts when using low ray count the blend factor used by the probe is high which slows down the GI changes.

Watch the video below to learn more about the technical and artistic aspects of this rendering feature:

Implementation is based on the following papers:

• "Dynamic Diffuse Global Illumination with Ray-Traced Irradiance Probes", Journal of Computer Graphics Tools, April 2019, Zander Majercik, Jean-Philippe Guertin, Derek Nowrouzezahrai, and Morgan McGuire
• "Scaling Probe-Based Real-Time Dynamic Global Illumination for Production", https://jcgt.org/published/0010/02/01/
• "Dynamic Diffuse Global Illumination with Ray-Traced Irradiance Fields", https://jcgt.org/published/0008/02/01/

Using DDGI

In the Post Process Global Illumination settings of the Graphics Settings or in a PostFX Volume set Mode to DDGI.

Then you can adjust the following options:

Option	Description
Intensity	Global Illumination indirect lighting intensity scale. Can be used to boost or reduce the GI effect.
BounceIntensity	Global Illumination infinite indirect lighting bounce intensity scale. Can be used to boost or reduce the GI effect for light bouncing on the surfaces.
Temporal Response	Defines how quickly GI blends between the the current frame and the history buffer. Lower values update GI faster, but with more jittering and noise. If the camera in your game doesn't move much, we recommend values closer to 1.
Distance	Camera-centered draw distance of the Global Illumination effect. Scene outside the range will use fallback irradiance. DDGI automatically derives its cascade layout from this distance and the global probe spacing, so continuously blending this value can recreate probe resources and cause a visible lighting reset.
Indirect Shadows Strength	Indirect lighting shadows intensity. Default is 1 for fully opaque shadowing, lower values bleed the lighting into shadowed areas. Can be sued for artistic control over GI.
Fallback Irradiance	The irradiance lighting outside the GI range used as a fallback to prevent a pure-black scene outside the Global Illumination range.
Indirect Resolution	The indirect lighting render resolution. Full gives better quality, but half improves performance.
Reflections	The indirect specular reflections rendering mode to use. Set this to DDGI to enable dynamic reflections.
Reflections Resolution	The indirect specular reflections render resolution. Full gives better quality, but half improves performance.

Additional relevant options in the Graphics Settings:

Option	Description
GI Quality	The Global Illumination quality. Controls the quality of the GI effect.
GI Probes Spacing	The Global Illumination probes spacing distance (in world units). Defines the quality of the GI resolution. Adjust to 200-500 to improve performance and lower frequency GI data.
Global Surface Atlas Resolution	The Global Surface Atlas resolution. Adjust it if the atlas "flickers" due to overflow (eg. to 4096).

You can adjust the maximum atlas resolution in Graphics Settings with the Global Surface Atlas Resolution property. Larger scenes where a high view distance is required should use a bigger atlas size to cover as many of the objects with gi as possible.

Ray Traced Reflections

In addition to diffuse lighting, the specular lighting can be improved with Global Illumination by changing the Trace Mode to Software Tracing in the Screen Space Reflections category (in the Graphics Settings or in a PostFx Volume).

This uses our custom Software Tracing of the Global Surface Atlas as a fallback method to the default Screen Tracing (also known as Screen Space Reflections), which does screen-space, depth buffer tracing with scene color sampling.

This screen space rendering method however comes with one major limitation, that is that pixels that are visible on-screen can be used in reflections. With software raytracing using the Global SDF and the Global Surface Atlas, full-scene raytracing is used which provides reflections even for off-screen objects.

Using this feature can have a significant performance impact (between 0.5-1ms of GPU time), but drastically enhances the look of the scenes by making the lighting more realistic and complete.

DDGI Specular Reflections

Change Reflections mode to DDGI in Post Process Settings to enable realtime rough reflections from automatically placed probes. Those probes are reusing results from indirect diffuse lighting radiance raytracing but convolve traces into radiance that is stored at 14x14 resolution per-probe (octahedral mapping). Output reflections are lower quality than Environment probes but are far more scalable and provide dynamic reflections by default. Average scene can utilize for example 50,000 probes at memory cost of 49MB of VRAM. Performance overhead varies on resolution, scene and GPU but is usually rather small: 0.5ms - 0.9ms (RTX 2080Ti).

Debug view of DDGI Specular probes:

Software Ray Tracing

The key difference between the original DDGI algorithm and the Flax implementation is the use of custom software raytracing instead of hardware raytracing. That's because we wanted to support using realtime GI even on older hardware which often does not support RTX-features.

Our implementation uses Signed Distance Fields rasterized into the Global SDF to perform ray tracing in the scene. However, this returns only the intersection point between ray and scene geometry, while the GI also needs to evaluate the direct and bounced indirect lighting.

To solve this, we implemented the Global Surface Atlas, which is a render pass that renders the surfaces scene objects which are near the camera into one giant atlas texture with projections of the object sides. This works similar to GBuffer rendering where materials output low-resolution color, emissive, roughness, normal, depth, etc. Then we light those pixels to evaluate direct and indirect lighting depending on the materials of the surfaces. Global Surface Atlas allows sampling these surfaces at an arbitrary location in the world, which makes it possible to evaluate lighting at the Global SDF trace hit location.

Debug Visualization

The image above shows the Debug visualization of the Global Surface Atlas (access this via View -> Debug View Global Surface Atlas in any 3D viewport).

The main part of the view contains the rasterized Global SDF as well as sampled atlas lighting. That's what the Software Raytracer sees and what is used for evaluating Global Illumination, thus it's essential to use this viewport to inspect the scene when working on GI in your levels.

On the right, starting from the top, you can see the Diffuse color of the Atlas surfaces, Normal vectors and packed other properties (AO, roughness, metalness).

As you can see, the Global Surface Atlas is a low-resolution representation of the scene, and combined with Global SDF has a precision between 10-20cm nearby camera. It can efficiently cover a scene up to 500m to have global lighting even far away from the camera.

Debugging the Surface Atlas

A common problem when working with DDGI in Flax is the inefficient representation of object surfaces in the Global Surface Atlas. In many cases that is caused by inaccurate SDF mesh representation, and in less frequent cases the object representation in the atlas is missing.

The debug viewport for Surface Atlas highlights missing surface pixels with a pink color inside the Diffuse viewport (the one in the upper right corner). This will usually be large meshes with interiors because the object projections are performed from 6 sides (top, bottom, left, right, front and back), so it misses the interior sides.

Some minimal pink color spots can appear and are normal and not a bigger problem, but should still be minimized in order to achieve good indirect lighting quality. There are several ways to improve this in your scenes:

• Try splitting large objects into smaller parts (eg. house building walls split into 4 parts with separate roof and floor),
• Setting up LODs for meshes (Surface Atlas always uses the lowest LOD for rasterization).

Debugging DDGI Probes

Use View -> Debug View -> Global Illumination to preview DDGI probes in a viewport. This is useful to see if the automatic probe relocation causes problems.

DDGI Tips & Tricks

• Setup proper Global SDF for a scene.
• Use StaticFlags on static scene objects to optimize rendering.
• If an object surface changes color/ emissive frequently (eg. animated in a shader or toggled at runtime), remove StaticFlags.Lightmap from it. This will cause it to be updated frequently instead of being cached.
• Use LODs for complex meshes (Global Surface Atlas rasterization is faster for meshes with a lower triangle count).
• A material's Position Offset is not supported and might cause lighting issues.
• Meshes need to have simple interiors (eg. house model with separate walls) - use Global Surface Atlas debug view to analyze your content.
• Large emissive surfaces like a TV screen might need additional light sources to correctly cover specular lighting.
• Small emissive objects might flicker due to imperfections caused by reduced rendering resources resolution.
• Use Global SDF Overlap debug view mode to analyze cost of SDF rasterization, which is related to the number of objects in each chunk of the world (shown an a picture below).

DDGI Memory

Total GPU memory usage of DDGI is between 200-300 MB (depending on quality and content):

• DDGI uses up to 69 MB of GPU memory (depending on quality),
• Global Surface Atlas uses around 24 MB of GPU memory (based on resolution setting),
• Global SDF uses up to 65 MB of GPU memory (depending on the quality),
• Models SDFs can use several MBs of GPU memory,
• Use Graphics.GI.Dump to log current stats or DDGI rendering internals and memory usage.

Performance & Optimization

Use StaticFlags on static scene objects to optimize rendering. Dynamic objects are rasterized into Global SDF more often and their surfaces are rendered into Global Surface Atlas at higher refresh rate.

Setup GI Quality to scale across different devices. GI Quality controls amount of rays that can be shoot from probes every frame. Higher quality uses more rays thus accoutns for more stable and dynamic GI. On lower quality, with less rays avaliable, GI can contain minor artifacts in low-light scenarios and uses higher blending to reduce nosie which limits GI propagation speed. Additional, Indirect Resolution setting can help on low-end devices by resolving GI lighting in lower resolution with bilateral upscaling (depth and normal weighting).