VRage3 Raytraced GI On/Off Comparison

Space Engineers uses a lot of semi-metallic materials, which gives a sort of "car paint" feel to the armor blocks. However, when showcasing raytracing I would prefer more matte materials, which are more common and our eyes are more used to looking at. With the debug menu added in 2.0.2.47, I can use debug menu settings to adjust these semi metallic materials to be matte while keeping metals still metallic (this can be done by enabling the debug menu with Ctrl+F12 and going to Render -> Debug, and setting Metalness x to 2.0 and Metalness + to -1.0.)

I used the base creative scene with a red and blue ship, as well as an asteroid base. I used the paint gun's very useful recolor feature to tweak the ship and base colors so light bounces more attractively and certain features are shown off better. For many of these, I have deleted some of the local lights blocks that are normally present, because they compete with indirect lighting.

Some context for the "before" images: Indirect lighting without raytracing is done by placing a GI probe at the camera position, and then rendering it and processing it over several frames using importance sampling. Most other games would use artist placed reflection probes or GI probes, or baked lighting, for non-raytraced GI solutions; however, these solutions would be difficult to implement in a game like Space Engineers 2, due to the lack of static geometry and ability for players to build their own ships and carve their own environments.

Here is a scene with some blocks removed from the ship and the sun pointed to shine some light inside. The environment probe at the camera is doing some work here, but it still looks flat and not quite right.

Raytraced Diffuse and Specular GI both enabled. These visuals allow stronger diffuse light, because it knows its proximity to the sun's light above. Reflections look more correct, and specular reflections light up the dark blocks..

Local lights are too expensive to be rendered into the GI probe cheaply, and are approximated as ambient light. With Raytraced GI off, indoor scenes often end up overly dark in areas that aren't directly lit.

However, local lights can be spatially represented in the raytracing, allowing their light to bounce around the scene realistically when Raytraced GI is enabled.

Here is an outdoor look at the asteroid base. Without raytraced GI, the base reflects the environment probe with a flat feel to the lighting.

Raytraced GI gives surfaces better information on where light is coming from, adding depth and subtle color.

This scene in the blue ship is a good chance to look at some more detailed geometry.

With Raytraced GI, light can come from emissive surfaces as well as other sources.

Here is a more mundane scene, with some simple crates in an unlit corner of the ship.

Even if there is not much light to work with, the simple introduction of realistic light bounces from raytraced GI can add a lot of depth.