OllieBrown

Photon mapping simulates both direct illumination and indirect illumination. However, the simulation of direct illumination is not as precise as a raytracing solution. Standard raytracing is very efficient and exact at simulating direct illumination and lighter2 already has a good implementation of this. The best solution would be to combine the results of raytracing and just the indirect lighting from the photon map.

To do this I've played around with ignoring the first bounce of the photons (this would be the direct illumination) and only storing photons that have scattered at least once. We then add the irradiance estimate to the direct lighting solution from raytracing. The results are quite promising but need to be calibrated. That is to say, the 'energy' in the photon mapped solution does not match the energy in the raytraced solution.

To calibrate, I think the best plan is to do some simple direct lighting simulations with just the photon map (include only first emitted photons and exclude the scattered ones). We can compare the overall brightness at different light power levels to the raytraced solution and hopefully figure out how to scale the two so that they match.

In the meanwhile, I've restructured lighter2's options a bit. Instead of just enabling direct and indirect you now specify which engine you want to use for each (raytracing or photon mapping for direct and photon mapping or none for indirect). This will make this calibration easy to perform and will give the option to those that would prefer it to use photon mapping for the entire lighting solution.

I'll add some images to support this post a little later.