Cellular Automata Global Illumination

September 2024 - Current day

Highlights

Same as in 2D

  • Double buffering pipeline to compute one step per frame in order to achieve high performance results
  • Fully ran by cellular automata rules in GLSL compute shaders. No ray tracing, no tricks.
  • Not tied up by the number of lights.
    • All lights are being computed at once in the same simulation in the same volume, more lights won’t affect performance or memory.

Changes for 3D

  • Everything 2D related was changed to their 3D counterpart (3D textures, vec3, etc.)
  • Raymarching inside a rasterized box using DDA to visualize the results
    • Each step samples the CAGI volume in order to determine if we hit something and gather volumetric data in the air.