Tom Sirdevan, look developer and lighting artist, explains distance fields and shows how to use them in Unreal 4 to create more convincing world-space ambient occlusion. He then shows how distance fields can also be used to achieve dynamic raytraced shadows, and contrasts them with cascade shadow maps to demonstrate the tradeoffs.
- [Voiceover] Let's look at another way…to get ambient occlusion…utilizing something called distance fields.…Essentially distance fields store the distance…to the closest surface at every point.…This intern allows for a very efficient raycasting…approach to be used, and raycasting is required…to do things like 3D world space ambient occlusion…as opposed to the 2D screen space occlusion we used before.…3D world space ambient occlusion is much closer…to real-world simulation of ambient occlusion…and so is of higher quality.…We'll also be able to use distance fields to do…real-time raytraced direct shadows.…
Before we go any further, let's clean up…the scene a little bit.…I'm gonna move some of the new lighting objects…into the lighting folder.…So sphere reflection capture and sphere reflection…capture two and the light mass importance volume…and gonna rid of this sphere…and I'll just hide that testing folder again.…If the intensity is at one for your directional light…I'm gonna move it back to 10.…
And then in the post-process volume,…
Author
Tom Sirdevan
Released
7/6/2016- Direct lighting
- Indirect lighting
- Creating a sky with Blueprint
- Deferred shading
- Dynamic sky and sun
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Video: Distance fields and raytraced shadows