I am not very experienced with shadow mapping / global illumination / ray-casting. But I do know C++, a bit of HLSL/CG and I work with DirectX 11.

I want to add an optimal light/shadows solution to my game engine (it can depend on pre-calculated maps). The engine usually works on closed scenes (e.g. room), with the camera behind the person (limited range of view, but good details). Most of the objects are static, but there are some skinned meshes too.

Which technique or combination of techniques (I know that some of them cannot be mixed together) will give me the "full" (complete) solution?

For now I have implemented the phong shading, but the result is far from "good enough":

I was thinking about shadow-mapping and/or SSAO (it's possible to combine them somehow?). Will that be "enough"?

I consider the radiosity as too expensive. The game engine supposed to works fine (60fps) on most of present graphic cards and the games target is not AAA productions. But I do have to improve the shading.

I guess that effects like bloom, HDR or even motion-blur etc. can improve the result, but are not really related to light & shadows (which don't look convincing in my engine now). So I don't consider them in that question.

I do know that those are just approximations and will never give me the quality level comparable to non real-time rendering (e.g. in 3ds max with GI).

I look for the direction and not for detailed step-by-step how-to. I know that the details are complicated and can be found elsewhere without the need to expand this thread to enormous size ;) I just need to decide which one to use and which can be combined.

Thank you for your patience.

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You can implement SSAO to have shadow when 2 surfaces are near and add shadow mapping on the point light to have shadow from your point light.

Bloom is the effect of blurring part of the image based on luminance. HDR is just to store the lighting result upper than 1.0 then you use a tone mapping to convert to LDR.

The luminance used for the bloom is based of the HDR image. You can add camera motion blur if you want to have movie effect.

To be more physically correct you can change your phong by Physically Based Rendering.

For the Antialiasing, FXAA is enough but suffer of the temporal aliasing.

After implementing all that then you will have better image result.

You can implement SSAO to have shadow when 2 surfaces are near and add shadow mapping on the point light to have shadow from your point light.

Bloom is the effect of blurring part of the image based on luminance. HDR is just to store the lighting result upper than 1.0 then you use a tone mapping to convert to LDR.

The luminance used for the bloom is based of the HDR image. You can add camera motion blur if you want to have movie effect.

To be more physically correct you can change your phong by Physically Based Rendering.

For the Antialiasing, FXAA is enough but suffer of the temporal aliasing.

After implementing all that then you will have better image result.

Do you know of any good sources for implementing PBR?

Also on the topic of SSAO I would suggest taking a look at http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/papers/SAOHPG12/

You have lot of information here : http://www.filmicworlds.com/2014/04/21/optimizing-ggx-shaders-with-dotlh/