As I mentioned, this whole system is powered by my own simple software ray tracing renderer. And what's the point if you're not going to goof around with weird lens projections 📸

Here's a demonstration of how probes can relocate themselves for better coverage. Blue probes are found to be inside (or too close) to geometry, so we push them away from the nearest surface normal where they can be more useful. Notice how the artefacts disappear and the lighting feels more accurate

I’ll pretend I did this on purpose.

Unity!

Probes are spaced along a regular grid but disable themselves if nothing is found nearby (all depth samples miss). I’m just choosing to render the active probes only!

I was particularly pleased with how nicely it plays with my stylised time of day lighting system (a tool I've been developing for Summerhill and other projects) ☀️🌙

It was fun digging into that stuff with you — you should share any more recent experiments!

Another random clip I never shared from when I was debugging moving grids and other optimisations. Here you can see new probes spawning around geometry as the camera moves. Larger cascades are disabled for a clearer demonstration.

It also worked pretty nicely for specular reflections and volumetric fog.

Ah, I mean it in the lightest possible sense — just a bit of a hobby project that threatened to consume me, so I put it aside to focus more on real life/work for a while.

A recap for the Bluesky crowd: my implementation was largely based on DDGI, which uses software raytracing to sample light into a grid of probes. I implemented multiple cascades, moving grids & dynamic probe states. It allowed for infinite bounces & (potentially) infinite environments.

Criminal that this is the first I’m hearing about it.

Thanks so much! I’ll give this a try!

Nice! Might need to take a trip to coast. Do you have a go to recipe?

I’ve always been curious about this after seeing it on River Cottage - does it actually taste like coconuts? Plenty of it around here, but rare to find any with a strong enough scent!

Congrats again, and lovely to meet you!