HTrace Screen Space Global IlluminationOverview
.png)
HTrace SSGI is a fully dynamic screen-space global illumination system that aims for accurate and responsive indirect lighting with detailed secondary shadows.
Main Features
- Full Integration into the Rendering Pipeline [HDRP]: automatic resource injection with no need for manual setup or package customization. HTrace SSGI overrides native indirect lighting resources, ensuring compatibility with other rendering effects.
- All Rendering Paths: fully supports Deferred / Deferred+ / Forward / Forward+ rendering paths, with no visual or quality differences between them.
- All Light Sources: compatible with all light types, including emissive materials that function as actual light sources and cast indirect soft shadows. Performance remains unaffected by the number of lights in the scene.
- Dynamic Environments: designed for fully dynamic and procedural environments where objects, materials, and lighting can change in real time with no extra performance cost or preprocessing.
- APV Fallback & Enhancement: natively supports Adaptive Probe Volumes as a fallback option. Enhances APV output by reducing light leaks and noise from low-resolution bakes, while adding fine GI details and occlusion from both static and dynamic objects.
- Advanced Denoising: powered by a cutting-edge ReSTIR Validation algorithm that maximizes temporal responsiveness, while preserving small details and keeping indirect shadows sharp during spatial filtering.
- Scalability: provides an adjustable Render Scale parameter for downscaled rendering, along with a wide range of options to fine-tune the effect and balance speed with quality.
- Infinite light bounces: simulated through a feedback loop, with each frame capturing an additional bounce of light.
- Render Layer Mask: selectively exclude objects from casting and/or receiving indirect lighting on a per-layer basis via the Render Layer Mask.
- VR Support [HDRP]: single-pass VR is supported.
- Open Code: the code is open for modification. If you have questions about how it works, feel free to reach out to us on Discord.
Limitations and Requirements
- Unity LTS releases are recommended; bug fixes for non-LTS versions are not guaranteed.
- APV Fallback in URP requires Unity 6000.0 or newer.
- Exclude Casting / Receiving options require Unity 6000.0 or newer.
- Orthographic Camera is untested and not guaranteed to work correctly.
- MSAA is untested and not guaranteed to work correctly.
Compatibility
- Currently tested APIs are: DX11 and DX12, Metal
- Currently tested HDRP / URP versions are: 14 and above.
- Currently tested Unity versions are: from 2022.2 to 6000.3.