AMD Radeon™ ProRender is a powerful physically-based path traced rendering engine that enables creative professionals to produce stunningly photorealistic images.
Rays that hit sky surfaces need to be transformed to the skybox coordinate space (via the sky camera's transform and a scale factor)
If using the HybridPro plugin, the raster pass would (by my understanding) need to render the skybox perspective to an RT as the Source implementation does
Performing this render seems trivial, but compositing the RT into the view less so
It could be as easy as rendering the player's real view over the top of the previous RT, if we can count sky faces as misses or as alpha 0 (without rendering what's behind)
It's not possible to just remove the sky faces from the mesh, as the 3D skybox is usually placed directly above the main world
This causes the skybox vertices to be visible from the player's perspective
It's also not possible to accurately remove the 3D skybox vertices themselves, as they're indistinguishable from other geometry
If any of the ProRender plugins use bidirectional path tracing, then light rays for directional/ibl/etc lighting would need to start within the sky faces
Acceptable solution
If all of the above is not possible to solve with ProRender, the following would be enough to get a reasonable effect:
Count all rays that hit sky faces as misses
Discard all sky face fragments for the hybrid raster pass
This would prevent any erroneous rendering of the 3D skybox and would allow rendering the 3D skybox using the same method as Source (compositing two separate renders).
The only issue with this is that elements of the skybox wont affect the lighting of the main world (i.e. a tall building in the skybox wont cast a shadow outside of the skybox)
Questions
Is the full solution possible with ProRender, and if so, how?
Is the acceptable solution possible with ProRender, and if so, how?
Context
SKY
flag set surrounding the main worldProblems
HybridPro
plugin, the raster pass would (by my understanding) need to render the skybox perspective to an RT as the Source implementation doesAcceptable solution
If all of the above is not possible to solve with ProRender, the following would be enough to get a reasonable effect:
This would prevent any erroneous rendering of the 3D skybox and would allow rendering the 3D skybox using the same method as Source (compositing two separate renders).
The only issue with this is that elements of the skybox wont affect the lighting of the main world (i.e. a tall building in the skybox wont cast a shadow outside of the skybox)
Questions