Radiance Cascades Global Illumination
I am working on a global illumination solution that uses an old and rarely used spherical ray marching technique, and radiance cascades, to be a weird middle ground between reflective shadow maps and screen space global illumination. I have a lot of work to do on it but the basic proof-of-concept is together and the performance and quality results are very promising.
I wrote this thing on it that goes through some of the literature background, and details what I want done by around October. If it all goes well, I am aiming to write an article on this technique for publication. My university Honours thesis covers the history of lighting for computer graphics.
Research proposal paper its not perfect and was first a university coursework submission but it covers what I am trying to do and why.
The technique started from wanting to get the original specular reflection technique going in a custom Vulkan renderer I spun up at the beginning of the year.
From there I started exploring some SSGI-like techniques using the same ray traversal proxy.
Then I was led to radiance cascades, and became almost completely immersed in global illumination literature, transport theory, and the history of global illumination techniques. Very cool stuff.
There will be a LOT more to come in here, as this is actively WIP. I post live updates on my X and in my Discord server.