Lighting in vvvv - am I missing something?

vvvv beta question
6

sorry, was in sort of a hurry yesterday. so i’ll elaborate a bit…

coming from non-realtime 3d i just started with hlsl when i tried vvvv like 1,5 years ago and always looked for ways to improve my shading. Deferred Rendering/Shading is basically a technique which moves the light evaluation of a 3d scene to a 2d space by calculating the actual lighting from buffers of a pre-pass shader which output scene depth, normals and other attributes needed for the light calculation. (for a better understanding of deferred shading maybe also look at this nice gamedev journal post.)

i’ve heard about deferred rendering/shading first when i ported ArKano22’s SSAO technique. the patch already has the basic deferred layout implemented, but opposed to full deferred rendering it does light evaluation with a simple cubemap lookup like the original example.

now to get fast deferred light evaluation (i’m talking hundreds of pointlights at 60fps) going in vvvv one would need to add some simple shaders for a lighting pass (like the ones from catalin zimas excellent (though xna) deferred tutorial) and a way of to optimize pixel overdraw in the light calculation by e.g. using the stencil buffer to reject unlit pixels or rebind the rendertarget of the pre-pass as output rendertarget for the light calculation. (and thereby making use of early-z rejection)

so what would be really needed is the way to optimize the drawcall in vvvv by exposing one of the mentioned techniques. (maybe they are already exposed and i’m just to stupid to apply them??)

here are some further links to good papers/articles about deferred rendering/shading:

GPU Gems - Chapter 9. Deferred Shading in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
GPU Gems 3 - Chapter 19. Deferred Shading in Tabula Rasa
Light Pre-Pass Renderer by Wolfgang Engel (also known as deferred lighting and often confused with full deferred rendering)

edit: i previously spoke to our belovvvved devvvvs about this but unfortunately never came around to sum my thoughts up and deliver some good links. sorry guys, just had too much urgent stuff this year)
-also this is a quite nice differentiation of deferred rendering/lighting (although the author is quite biased ;D)