Target hardware... Well, let's say a GeForce 8 or something. I haven't tried it yet, and maybe I just should try it. Let's see how many nodes can be measured at a reasonable speed.

I can't use 8 cubeMaps though. The ambient output is placed in one of the deferred target textures. This also includes the emissive texture and reflection from a cubeMap. The ambient light itself uses a normalMap( and possibly with a heightMap for parallax), and should be multiplied with a diffuse texture. I think I can use 2 or 3 cubeMaps at maximum, the other channels are occupied, and the deferred lighting approach makes it difficult to change that. Maybe I can squeeze a little bit more out of it with multipassing, but that costs extra energy of course. And I need to know how to blend between the cubeMaps. If each vertex gets 1 cubeMap, I could blend between 3 with the help of the distance between the pixel and the vertex. However, all of this also makes the ambient lighting a lot more expensive. If each vertex is connected to just 1 color, the vertex shader could do a lot of the work.

>> All this stuff is useless without proper indirect lighting (in my opinion).
Absolutely true in my case. Without ambient light, 80% of my scenes would be pitch black.

I will take a look into your paper, thanks for posting that :)

Greetings,
Rick

I apologise in advance if I have missed something in this thread, but it seems as if you are all regarding Crysis as using a fairly realistic Ambient Occlusion model. In fact they are using a screen space technique to fake AO, as they decided that true AO provided very little additional benefit, and cost a lot more.

Here is Crytek's paper on their visuals, which describes the technique (albeit somewhat lacking in detail):
Finding Next Gen – CryEngine 2

And here is Inigo Quilez' excellent IOTD thread (with pretty pictures) where he takes a good bash at implementing the technique:
SSAO

Judging on the screenshots I posted earlier here, the ambient lighting is indeed not that spectacular in Crysis. The outdoor scenes are very impressive, but the indoor locations are a little bit... flat / no athmosphere. Nevertheless, its an interesting technique. Thanks for the links, now I have something to read before going to sleap :)

Cheers,
Rick

Ah, thanks again! It's not a bad idea to only update a few nodes per frame. I could place them in a queue or something.

The ATI demo didn't run though. I have Windows Vista and DirectX10 (I suppose), but the demo says "D3D device creation failed". I also had this error with other nVidia demo's that would normally run. Any idea why that is?

The paper included in that demo is talking about rendering "slices" in a 3D texture. With that, multiple nodes can be done in 1 pass... I don't really understand that part. I never used 3D textures (what's the difference with a cubeMap), and what do they mean with slices?

Greetings,
Rick

Here is another paper of screen space ambient occlusion.