Lumen took a lot of exploration to reach shippable state. This ability to focus on a single thing is an awesome perk of working at Epic and I wanted to shed some light on early techniques I worked on with Daniel Wright and which we later discarded: knarkowicz.wordpress.com/2022/08/18/jou…

The response has been amazing! Thank you! There is one type of response that I’ve heard that I’d like to correct though. I did not prove anything was the right or wrong approach. These were merely my conclusions along the way as to the path I most believed would achieve my goals.

The slides for our huge Lumen presentation in the Advances course at Siggraph 2022 are now up! We presented all of our work on real-time Global Illumination in UE5 to date, with lots of inside info from 'The Matrix Awakens' demo. advances.realtimerendering.com/s2022/index.ht… Krzysztof Narkowicz Patrick Kelly

Is there some trick to pick N unique samples using Weighted Reservoir Sampling? Standard approach of running sample selection N times per each input item results in duplicated samples, which can be quite wasteful.

Painters used similar shadow hacks as games - flat blobs projected on floor under characters, fake lights, lighting channels, lack of area shadows, lack of self-shadowing... thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-art-of-the…

Interesting BVH stats from Cyberpunk and Hogwarts Legacy (though article itself has some dubious bits). chipsandcheese.com/2023/03/22/ray…

GDC Vault is slowly being populated with 2023 content. Amongst other talks, "Rendering God of War Ragnark" and and Cyberpunk "Building Night City: The Technology of Cyberpunk 20277" slides are already available. gdcvault.com/play/1028846/R…

Star Wars Outlaws gameplay looks amazing. One thing which stands out is a strong barrel distortion coupled with a blur. Nice touch and I don't think I've ever seen it before in an AAA game (outside of quake mods).

Sony Creators Conference talks: Gran Turismo 7 rendering, Screen space shadows and 3d asset creation with generative AI: youtu.be/btWy-BAERoY

SIGGRAPH ReSTIR course materials are amazing. They also just uploaded Cyberpunk Overdrive slides. Indirect/emissive/skylight is handled by "naive" BRDF sampling. Analytical lights use MIS to mix ReSTIR and "naive" BRDF sampling (reused indirect rays). intro-to-restir.cwyman.org

Enjoyed watching Spider-Man 2 tech interview. It has some cool tricks like ray tracing room interiors instead of ray marching cubemaps and in general their RT reflection tech is quite impressive: youtu.be/fuu_wseJnIE?si…