Summary
In this chapter, we extended our lighting system to support many point lights with an efficient implementation. We started with a brief history of shadow algorithms, and their benefits and shortcomings, up until some of the most recent techniques that take advantage of raytracing hardware.
Next, we covered our implementation of shadows for many point lights. We explained how cubemaps are generated for each light and the optimizations we implemented to make the algorithm scale to many lights. In particular, we highlighted the culling method we reused from the main geometry pass and the use of a single indirect draw call for each light.
In the last section, we introduced sparse textures, a technique that allows us to dynamically bind memory to a given resource. We highlighted the algorithm we used to determine the contribution of each point light to the scene and how we use that information to determine the resolution of each cubemap. Finally, we demonstrated how to use...