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# Objective
Bevy could benefit from *irradiance volumes*, also known as *voxel
global illumination* or simply as light probes (though this term is not
preferred, as multiple techniques can be called light probes).
Irradiance volumes are a form of baked global illumination; they work by
sampling the light at the centers of each voxel within a cuboid. At
runtime, the voxels surrounding the fragment center are sampled and
interpolated to produce indirect diffuse illumination.
## Solution
This is divided into two sections. The first is copied and pasted from
the irradiance volume module documentation and describes the technique.
The second part consists of notes on the implementation.
### Overview
An *irradiance volume* is a cuboid voxel region consisting of
regularly-spaced precomputed samples of diffuse indirect light. They're
ideal if you have a dynamic object such as a character that can move
about
static non-moving geometry such as a level in a game, and you want that
dynamic object to be affected by the light bouncing off that static
geometry.
To use irradiance volumes, you need to precompute, or *bake*, the
indirect
light in your scene. Bevy doesn't currently come with a way to do this.
Fortunately, [Blender] provides a [baking tool] as part of the Eevee
renderer, and its irradiance volumes are compatible with those used by
Bevy.
The [`bevy-baked-gi`] project provides a tool, `export-blender-gi`, that
can
extract the baked irradiance volumes from the Blender `.blend` file and
package them up into a `.ktx2` texture for use by the engine. See the
documentation in the `bevy-baked-gi` project for more details as to this
workflow.
Like all light probes in Bevy, irradiance volumes are 1×1×1 cubes that
can
be arbitrarily scaled, rotated, and positioned in a scene with the
[`bevy_transform::components::Transform`] component. The 3D voxel grid
will
be stretched to fill the interior of the cube, and the illumination from
the
irradiance volume will apply to all fragments within that bounding
region.
Bevy's irradiance volumes are based on Valve's [*ambient cubes*] as used
in
*Half-Life 2* ([Mitchell 2006], slide 27). These encode a single color
of
light from the six 3D cardinal directions and blend the sides together
according to the surface normal.
The primary reason for choosing ambient cubes is to match Blender, so
that
its Eevee renderer can be used for baking. However, they also have some
advantages over the common second-order spherical harmonics approach:
ambient cubes don't suffer from ringing artifacts, they are smaller (6
colors for ambient cubes as opposed to 9 for spherical harmonics), and
evaluation is faster. A smaller basis allows for a denser grid of voxels
with the same storage requirements.
If you wish to use a tool other than `export-blender-gi` to produce the
irradiance volumes, you'll need to pack the irradiance volumes in the
following format. The irradiance volume of resolution *(Rx, Ry, Rz)* is
expected to be a 3D texture of dimensions *(Rx, 2Ry, 3Rz)*. The
unnormalized
texture coordinate *(s, t, p)* of the voxel at coordinate *(x, y, z)*
with
side *S* ∈ *{-X, +X, -Y, +Y, -Z, +Z}* is as follows:
```text
s = x
t = y + ⎰ 0 if S ∈ {-X, -Y, -Z}
⎱ Ry if S ∈ {+X, +Y, +Z}
⎧ 0 if S ∈ {-X, +X}
p = z + ⎨ Rz if S ∈ {-Y, +Y}
⎩ 2Rz if S ∈ {-Z, +Z}
```
Visually, in a left-handed coordinate system with Y up, viewed from the
right, the 3D texture looks like a stacked series of voxel grids, one
for
each cube side, in this order:
| **+X** | **+Y** | **+Z** |
| ------ | ------ | ------ |
| **-X** | **-Y** | **-Z** |
A terminology note: Other engines may refer to irradiance volumes as
*voxel
global illumination*, *VXGI*, or simply as *light probes*. Sometimes
*light
probe* refers to what Bevy calls a reflection probe. In Bevy, *light
probe*
is a generic term that encompasses all cuboid bounding regions that
capture
indirect illumination, whether based on voxels or not.
Note that, if binding arrays aren't supported (e.g. on WebGPU or WebGL
2),
then only the closest irradiance volume to the view will be taken into
account during rendering.
[*ambient cubes*]:
https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2006/Mitchell-ShadingInValvesSourceEngine.pdf
[Mitchell 2006]:
https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2006/Mitchell-ShadingInValvesSourceEngine.pdf
[Blender]: http://blender.org/
[baking tool]:
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/eevee/render_settings/indirect_lighting.html
[`bevy-baked-gi`]: https://github.com/pcwalton/bevy-baked-gi
### Implementation notes
This patch generalizes light probes so as to reuse as much code as
possible between irradiance volumes and the existing reflection probes.
This approach was chosen because both techniques share numerous
similarities:
1. Both irradiance volumes and reflection probes are cuboid bounding
regions.
2. Both are responsible for providing baked indirect light.
3. Both techniques involve presenting a variable number of textures to
the shader from which indirect light is sampled. (In the current
implementation, this uses binding arrays.)
4. Both irradiance volumes and reflection probes require gathering and
sorting probes by distance on CPU.
5. Both techniques require the GPU to search through a list of bounding
regions.
6. Both will eventually want to have falloff so that we can smoothly
blend as objects enter and exit the probes' influence ranges. (This is
not implemented yet to keep this patch relatively small and reviewable.)
To do this, we generalize most of the methods in the reflection probes
patch #11366 to be generic over a trait, `LightProbeComponent`. This
trait is implemented by both `EnvironmentMapLight` (for reflection
probes) and `IrradianceVolume` (for irradiance volumes). Using a trait
will allow us to add more types of light probes in the future. In
particular, I highly suspect we will want real-time reflection planes
for mirrors in the future, which can be easily slotted into this
framework.
## Changelog
> This section is optional. If this was a trivial fix, or has no
externally-visible impact, you can delete this section.
### Added
* A new `IrradianceVolume` asset type is available for baked voxelized
light probes. You can bake the global illumination using Blender or
another tool of your choice and use it in Bevy to apply indirect
illumination to dynamic objects.
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