HDR vs LDR Image Based Lighting

During my work as Technical and lighting artist, I was asked by level art team: “why we can’t use LDR images as skyboxes, they are so fancy and handpainted, why not?”

Update for SP shaders

Re-writing some of the SP shaders to filtered importance sampling, looks promising:

Default PBR-metal-rough:

Iray reference render:

New filtered IS method:

Looks like that rough metals are the most affected.

Substance Painter Shader - Unreal Engine 4(update)

A little update : filtering(de-noise) should properly work with any env texture size now
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Hey folks! I've just found an outstanding solution for a noise problem, the idea is to read mips for low-probability samples, it worked surprisingly well:

this method was used in Frostbyte 3 engine games later SW Battlefront and described in [Lagarde2014] and GPU Gems 3

Download Shader

Writing Shaders for Substance Painter part 1

Introduction

Hi, in this article I’ll try to explain to you how Substance Painter surface-lighting interaction works, what modifications I added to it and why I made them..

Substance Painter Shader - Unreal Engine 4

So back in a day I needed a shader for UE4, I gooled it and found nothing. So I wrote it by myself :)
I came up to some nasty surprises left for me by both Epic and Allegorithmic, but I'll write about that another time.

Download Shader

Link to Substance Share

Here is some comparison pictures:

Substance Painter

Hemisphere based ray matched SSAO

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Article is a bit outdated, with all that fancy compute shader-based aglorithms, but maybe

someone will find it usefull

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Hemisphere based ray matched SSAO

1.Introduction

SSAO is not a new method for solving the Global Illumination. The very first implementation of it was performed by Crytek in 2007. Still, SSAO has a lot of problems. In this work I have made an attempt to solve them.

     Figure 1. Typical game environment (16x6 IRAO)