Offline lightmapper

[BearishSun]

Another way of handling global illumination. This time by completely backing the lighting information into a lightmap texture. Only works on fully static objects, making it even more restrictive than light volumes. However they are very easy to evaluated and yield high quality lighting. The lightmapped object would have to have a separate UV generated in-engine, but there are libraries to integrate which do just that. Similarly AMD's RadeonRays could be used for actual lightmap rendering.

[christianclavet]

Unity just integrated it in their last build:
https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/03/29/amd-radeon-rays-integrated-into-unitys-gpu-progressive-lightmapper/

[BearishSun]

I've heard. nVidia also announced some interesting ray tracing technology, but it seems locked to their Vega GPUs. Will be nice to explore once someone makes a unrestricted version (probably AMD by extending Radeon Rays for dynamic scenes).

Also, as a note to self: When designing the lightmapper it would be nice to allow objects or parts of objects to be re-mapped on the fly. This would allow for kind-of semi-dynamic lightmapping. Similar to what they do in Frostbite I believe.