Hey folks,
It’s time for another development update again, although I have still been focusing my efforts on the KappaPT rework which has made some good progress. In addition to that I’ve also been fairly occupied with other things in the last weeks, so I wasn’t able to work on it as much as I’d have liked to.
KappaPT
I’ve finished most of the fundamental path-traced lighting recently which means I can finally show you some work-in-progress screenshots of it. The indirect lighting is currently limited to a single bounce though, as I am still working on the irradiance cache which is unfortunately less cooperative than I want to and I am not quite sure why. My major issue there is that the irradiance cache gets flooded with skylight for no apparent reason, which obviously means that it’s unusable like that as it would lead to ambient light everywhere. After I’ve figured out what exactly is going on there I’ll probably be working on a new solution for the reflections, as I’ll be able to do various improvements there, especially when it comes to the reflections denoiser.
I’ll most likely also release this update in two parts, with the first one focusing on all the internal changes and the second one bringing parity with the latest Kappa Shader. This seems like the best approach to iron out any issues caused by the new voxel storage and path-tracing implementations before I start focusing on other features and changes.
I hope that I’ll be able to finish all the path-tracing and voxel related changes in this month if everything works out as intended.
Closing Words
I’ve been going a bit slower on updates than usual as you might have noticed (including this slightly delayed development update post) which is mostly due to me being occupied with a lot of other things in addition to the somewhat crazy weather shifts going from almost being cold on one day to more than tropical nights the other. That’s something that I’m not quite able to handle too well, aside from the daytime heat following the warm nights making working on things a bit difficult as well. Tl;dr I’m really not a (at this point strangely late-) summer person lol, but it’s supposed to finally cool off for good in the next weeks which would be nice.
Last but not least it’s time for another massive thanks to my supporters on Patreon, who have broken yet another record as I’ve reached over 1400 Patreon subscribers in the last month. As I’ve already said countless times before, I’m very grateful for your ongoing support and I hope that I’ll be able to release some more new updates for you all soon once the KappaPT rework is finally done :)
And that’s all I have to say for this month, stay tuned for any upcoming updates!
