Blender Git Loki

Eevee: Irradiance Visibility: Initial Implementation

This augment the existing irradiance grid with a new visibility precomputation.
We store a small shadowmap for each grid sample so that light does not leak through walls and such.

The visibility parameter are similar to the one used by the Variance Shadow Map for point lights.

Technical details:

We store the visibility in the same texture (array) as the irradiance itself (in order to reduce the number of sampler).
But the irradiance and the visibility are not the same data so we must encode them in order to use the same texture format.
We use RGBA8 normalized texture and encode irradiance as RGBE (shared exponent).
Using RGBE encoding instead of R11_G11_B10 may lead to some lighting changes, but quality seems to be nearly the same in my test cases.
Using full RGBA16/32F maybe a future option but that will require much more memory and reduce the perf significantly.

Visibility moments (VSM) are encoded as 16bits fixed point precision using a special range. This seems to retain enough precision for the needs.
Also interpolation does not seems to be big problem (even though it's incorrect).