September 19th, 2023 Livestream

Snutt Talk: Shadow rendering techniques

https://youtu.be/z0gVOREXHGs

Topics

• Technology > Graphics
• Technology > Unreal Engine > Unreal Engine 5

Transcript

I think maybe virtual Shadow maps are not experimental anymore in 5.3 or something but we don't use that anyways which interesting enough I didn't realize this until nobody cares about this stuff but one of the new techniques in Unreal Engine is that they're using, virtual Shadow Maps which is, in layman's terms it's like a way to so Shadows is like one of the most complex parts of 3D rendering, believe it or not and there are a couple of different techniques and they're all quite expensive, like the most used technique is called cascading Shadow Maps where for every light source in the scene you would first render that scene from the view of that light source and project it into a depth buffer you would do that for every light in the scene and then when you're shading stuff you would look at each pixel and be like all right are you are you visible from that light source are you visible from that light source are you visible from that light source and then like add that for every pixel and like generating those cascading Shadow maps and and like handling the stuff is is it's a huge operation so there's a bunch of techniques to like try and save that and with virtual Shadow Maps, the way they do it is is like it's similar to to nanite sort of where they sort of render everything into one huge buffer and then they scale different parts of that buffer up and down depending on how close you are to different things on the screen, and that technique was developed by my professor in, in, in at University that I studied under when I studied computer graphics and that technique was like invented when I was studying like that was a new thing they just like made a paper about and now we're seeing it in in engines, which is pretty interesting I think because like when they come up came up with that there wasn't support hardware for the technique that they they they did and now what is it eight years later, now that support is there because you know like the way it works is like when Hardware manufacturers when they develop Hardware they they look at like what, scientific progress has been made in in the realm of 3D graphics and then they decide like which Avenue to pursue and apparently this was important enough to pursue and I think it's gonna it's gonna be pretty dope because you can have a lot of light sources