While the methods are similar in that they both ray-march through the scene to compute per-pixel fluence, the algorithm presented in the blog post scales linearly with the number of light sources, whereas Radiance Cascades can handle an arbitrary distribution of light sources with constant time by benefiting from geometric properties of lighting. Radiance Cascades are also not limited to SDFs for smooth shadows.
Yeah, and I believe Radiance Cascades accurately calculate the size of the penumbra from the size and distance of the area light, which also means that point light sources, as in reality, always produce hard shadows.
The technique here seems to rely more on eyeballing a plausible penumbra without explicitly considering a size of the light source, though I don't quite understand the core intuition.
While the methods are similar in that they both ray-march through the scene to compute per-pixel fluence, the algorithm presented in the blog post scales linearly with the number of light sources, whereas Radiance Cascades can handle an arbitrary distribution of light sources with constant time by benefiting from geometric properties of lighting. Radiance Cascades are also not limited to SDFs for smooth shadows.
Yeah, and I believe Radiance Cascades accurately calculate the size of the penumbra from the size and distance of the area light, which also means that point light sources, as in reality, always produce hard shadows.
The technique here seems to rely more on eyeballing a plausible penumbra without explicitly considering a size of the light source, though I don't quite understand the core intuition.