Here’s more news on Godot Vulkan progress. Last month was the 4th report and now we have the 5th report. Great to see that Juan Linietsky is keeping us informed each month.

The entire report is about GIProbes 2.0. This is a feature that provides global illumination. It was introduced in Godot 3.0 but it was limited to static geometry and it didn’t perform very well and the quality wasn’t that great either.

Here’s the summary of improvements:

  • Performance improvements. Thanks to the optimizations Matias Goldberg figured out in Ogre 3D. Nice to see both teams work together.
  • Real-time lighting. In Gogot 3.0 changes in light settings had significant frame delays but not anymore. Thanks to a clever voxel lighting implementation using signed distance fields.
  • Multiple Bounces. Instead of having no lighting bounces now you have 3. This improves image quality and makes voxel reflections more useful.
  • Ambient occlusion. By default voxel occlusion was already generated but now you can tweak it manually.
  • Dynamic Objects. This allows objects to contribute and receive light from the scene. This feature uses voxel ambient occlusion was well. According to Juan it’s very fast (possible to have dozens of dynamic objects with little to no cost to medium/low end GPUs) and allows more realism than traditional super sampling ambient occlusion (SSAO). Very nice.

So Godot 4.0 will have a complete and easy to use solution for global illumination. This may not seem like it but it is a great feature. It will allow much faster development.

At the end of the report Juan talks about Godot Patreon. If you’re interested in the project you contribute to it with cash.