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by rendaw 177 days ago
Only slightly related, but since Minecraft seems to have a lot of community graphics programming associated with it I thought I'd ask here...

Does anyone know how those Minecraft realistic rendering mods work? I'm guessing today there's a lot of RTX, but e.g. in 2018 there was still fairly impressive global illumination in SEUS Renewed. Minecraft is the definition of a world with dynamic geometry, and I'm not aware of any decent realtime GI algorithms for 3d. The lighting in base Minecraft is a super basic and ugly hack. I've seen Unity's dynamic GI features and those are nowhere near as good either.
2 comments
HeliumHydride 177 days ago
I don't know much about lighting, but looking at the source code of the shaders might give a clue. https://modrinth.com/discover/shaders has a lot of shaders that change the lighting. In other parts of the rendering pipeline, there are some very impressive mods utilizing GPU magic. One of them is Voxy (https://modrinth.com/mod/voxy), one that massively increases render distance with mesh shaders and level-of-detail based rendering.
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rendaw 176 days ago
Ah yeah, I was mostly interested in lighting, but that's really interesting too.

Voxy's LOD thing... so like, I guess what they do is when you're in an area so that area's high LOD assets are loaded, it computes the lower LOD and saves it, and then as you move around you get a library of more and more lower LODs? And since modifications to geometry only happen when you're nearby the LODs are static? I'd love to see a writeup of that too...

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amlib 177 days ago
A lot of non raytracing GI solutions uses voxel grids on top of the world geometry, SVOGI is one of the fancy ones used in cry engine games. I imagine since minecraft essentially gives a voxel grid to you for "free" most of minecraft GI solutions also uses a similar technique.
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