Radiance Cascades is a technique for rendering real-time soft shadows/global illumination.

This paper uses it in the context of astrophysics, but it has a good up-to-date explanation of the algorithm in general, not limited to astrophysics.

Seriously talk about poor naming. Even the start of this paper is the same as the other Radiance Cascades GI paper.

I know of one 2D version of this available on Shader Toy where you can immediately play around [0], but its speed is limited by the tooling available at Shader Toy.

However, a quick search shows that this technique is already popular on the Internet. There are some GitHub repositories you can find.

But I especially like the videos by Mytino [1]. Has anyone seen any 3D versions yet?

[0] https://www.shadertoy.com/view/mtlBzX

[1] https://x.com/MytinoGames

The author of the technique has a video of it in 3d: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ua-h1pg6yM

MΛX is working on a 3D implementation and has been sharing their progress on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/mxacop/status/1822851339635867878?s=46&t...

And a few others are working on their own and have been sharing progress in the discord dedicated to the technique.

Tried looking for some implementations after listening to Alexander Sannikovs talk, no luck.

I wrote a walkthrough and implementation: https://jason.today/rc

There are implementations in game maker (https://github.com/Yaazarai/GMShaders-Radiance-Cascades), Godot (https://github.com/Sohojoe/radiance-cascades-godot), bevy (https://github.com/kornelski/bevy_flatland_radiance_cascades), webgpu (https://tmpvar.com/poc/radiance-cascades), and webgl- along with implementations in proprietary engines.