Implemented mixing Screenspace data with RT BVH world. After a ray hits, first check is Screen-space(Strict tolerances), then SHARC and if both miss it falls back to computing the full lighting, notice the reflections correctly have lighting in case of screen-space failures.

WIP Async Compute(BVH Build with Skinning). To fully load the GPU. The path tracing is done at 1440p as well as the rendering. A bit complicated when mixed with DX11, but was able to save 0.5ms frame-time. As ideally Shadowmap passes can also be overlapped with other compute.

Better utilization of SHARC and Updates to Denoiser(Based on Nvidia NRD). SHARC cache (4 bounces/Quarter Res). Main pass(1 Bounce, SHARC pulls the rest of the bounce info). Without/With SHARC support. 3rd Image is full composite with SHARC support(Ignore grass as that is WIP)

Dynamic BVH Update : Now the cloth bits are in the bvh as well. Here is full comparision of when disabled vs enabled

Skinned characters/weapons are almost fully in the bvh, color is now part of the "Vertex Bake" which is done when the dynamic object is first rendered and cached

Continuing the live stream series "illusory shows Keith (@marrowhyena.bsky.social) NES games". Will tonight be the night he beats Fire N Ice? Tune in now to hang out and find out: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNt-...

Skinned BVH Comparision, without and with, the ancient dragon creates lot of occlusion /reflections in scene. Note there is no proper light bleed yet have used a default grey for skinned characters right now.

Animated characters now in BVH. I am still working on the right importance sampling for variance reduction, the noise in the reflection is due to the reflection of the GI lighting mostly.

ARC Raiders has gotten a lot of buzz on PC for being an Unreal Engine game "done right". Does it live up to the hype? Have Embark Studio managed to avoid common issues found in nearly all Unreal Engine titles? Find out in my in-depth PC review with optimised settings! youtu.be/jCWtIIlFXHA

Slowly improving the Path tracer in DS2. Note direct lighting is still analytical, but 2 bounces are done for indirect while sampling the direct radiance from screenspace, if that fails it will sample the sun light right now (with shadow ray). Here is base game vs latest LE

Adding the .5D(CameraDepth) to the 2D motion vectors. This reduces valid history being rejected.

Ray marching is a common approach to GPU-accelerated volume rendering, but gives biased transmittance estimates. My new #SIGGRAPHAsia paper (+code) proposes an amazingly simple formula to eliminate this bias almost completely without using more samples. momentsingraphics.de/SiggraphAsia...

Left : Current best lighting, which has sky shadow maps, SSGI/SSR. Right : Hardware Path tracing with 2 indirect bounces, total 3, as primary bounce is not done. This is not final, but is very promising and provides context on how it changes things

WIP RTGI. Now doing 2 indirect lighting, there are still some issues, but working on them

Normals were already part of the BVH Geometry buffers, Albedo/Roughness/Metalness are now added and stored as part of vertex geometry accessible from hit point. This will help in Color transport especially for diffuse lighting as its a very low frequency signal.

Testing out HWRT, BVH. Now all lighting is combined. The left image is with Skyshadowmap, Sunshadow, SSGI + SSR. The Right image is just SunShadow, Now Skylighting/SSGI/SSR is now all wrapped in HWRT. It just works

More BVH work, Now able to seamlessly load BVH across the zones as each zone have their own BVH(BLASes) with some overlaps in-between. I am yet to move the builds to Async compute queues and is next on my list as all this is foundational work for RT.

Progress on BVH/HWRT Implementation. Support lookup buffers to fetch the Triangle data for hit point, other attributes like vertex colors will be added as well. The Normal is important part as bounce calculations will be based on that.

HW RayTracing Acceleration Structure(TLAS) Debug view Completed building the BVH - Bottom Level and Top Level Acceleration Structures . The debug view the is hit distance shown - similar to depth buffer

Dark Souls 2 Firelink Edition is finally out! This is a new DS2 experience with new visuals, items, weapons, armor, enemy and item location and many more changes. Tell your friends and family. I hope you all enjoy it.

Adding additional debugging for Screen space tracing, the denoiser and shading is now updated to be better than previous versions as well.

Majula really shines when you back up the insane art direction with incredibly modern rendering techniques courtesy of @dslightingengine.bsky.social and tuned/configured by me alongside my material/surface work

Updating SSGI solution in LE, both for #darksouls3 and #darksouls2, a lot of code/features are now unified across the games.

Water SSR Defog fix. As SSR reflects what is on the screen, the pixel being reflected has fog which is calculated based on eye distance, thus leading to "double dip" on fog in the scene.

i fight the dragonrider in heide's tower of flame in my second sin mod (powered by @dslightingengine.bsky.social ) youtu.be/30c2c__ZkCk

cathedral of the deep in #darksouls3 le. This place was originally envisioned to be moonlit similar to bloodborne

Woods in motion

Road of sacrifices , normal mode and matching the bonfire images to make it blue lighting. I probably will make COTD "moon lit" after this. Everything casting and receiving shadows including the water

Crystal sage boss fight www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZu8...

Finishing up relighting the swamp in #DarkSouls3 www.youtube.com/watch?v=8z9K...

Sky lighting now effects water along with shadow correctly and the strength of the "sky shadow" which is vertically down can now be adjusted in #darksouls3 le

Working on the swamp today

Irithyll comparison shots of base game vs le in #darksouls3

Posted this before, another showcase of plausible directional contact shadows, which uses bent-normals/ao and sphere caps. The lights below are not "true" shadow casting lights. Left image is just AO as attenuation, Thanks to @arycama.bsky.social for his help with spherical caps test.

Relighting profaned capital in #darksouls3 le.

Enabling shadows on many lights in the Irythill dungeon. LE culls meshes efficiently and generates draw calls as necessary for each light source.

0 to shadows in 25 seconds in #darksouls3 le

Ariandel in #darksouls3 le. Full gameplay youtube link below which showcases handling transition to multiple zones in the area. Check it out

Indie games have long moved beyond the SNES/Genesis (pixel art) retro wave and into the PS1/N64 (low-poly) retro wave, and we're far enough into the era that the PS2/Xbox (mid-poly) retro wave is slowly rolling over the horizon.

Painted world in #darksouls3 le

The time has come for Digital Foundry to go independent. We are going happily into this future!!! I cannot wait. We are looking to expand our PC coverage in time. We need another Alex. If you are interested to do PC work like I do and cover the cutting edge im PC Tec, get in contact.

Here is full gameplay of Archdragon peak zone www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWkC...

Archdragon peak

Working on ADP in #darksouls3 lighting engine, setting up shadows and lighting. I have setup atmospheres to be detected more accurately now. Will just be posting shots in this thread. Love the large scale AO using skyshadowmap, especially noticeable in 3rd image.

Working on reducing the package file sizes in DS3LE. LE already only stores requried vertex attributes like Position/UV Coordinates to reduce data stored. Now there is zlib compression added to data as well.

As I had indicated earlier different solutions to handle occlusion under the feet. Here I reduced the contribution of contact shadows from ambient just near the player feet area to avoid over darkening.

These AI generated answers to YouTube comments are so accurate and definitely something I would write. Truly the future! #JustAIThings

Darksouls3 has issue of not rendering shadows when the player is hollow, every other hollow has shadows. Now there is a fix for that in DS3LE(Including Lite). By caching the draw call state(VB, IB, Matrices) during Gbuffer render pass and then replay that into the shadowmap.

Had to up the denoiser to handle alpha tested/thin objects better otherwise the new shadows will not be fully stable. There is some compromise on the player feet ghosting, but can be mitigated through other means like reducing GTAO contribution around feet area. www.youtube.com/watch?v=j53A...

Thanks to @arycama.bsky.social for helping me with contact shadows using Bent normals + AO. This is still WIP but is very promising. 1st Image using just AO for light attenuation, 2nd image my old method similar to one used in Crysis3. 3rd image is the new technique.