Post B1vcFPHjec2un68s0e by shironeko@fedi.tesaguri.club
 (DIR) More posts by shironeko@fedi.tesaguri.club
 (DIR) Post #B1vbhUcxHkSDVutccC by gsuberland@chaos.social
       2026-01-04T02:56:58Z
       
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       graphics programmer folks: is there a sane way to render thousands of point lights that can change brightness and colour in realtime, with the assumption that all objects in the scene (including the lights) are fixed in place, but with the restriction that any per-scene preprocessing / baking must be fast (say, 10 seconds at most)?the use-case is pixel mapping previs in WebGL, rendering big LED strips and matrices in a custom scene that the user sets up.
       
 (DIR) Post #B1vbhVogrbR3CbOVXs by gsuberland@chaos.social
       2026-01-04T02:59:25Z
       
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       my previous attempt at this involved using regular lights in threejs and using a single light per "group" of pixels, changing the colour and brightness based on the sum of the group, but it was janky, error prone, didn't really look very good, and still very slow.
       
 (DIR) Post #B1vbhWQGbtUd58yW7E by shironeko@fedi.tesaguri.club
       2026-01-04T03:06:02.730005Z
       
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       @gsuberland got some example pictures? doesn't sound hard given that points are usually a primitive that graphics apis support natively.
       
 (DIR) Post #B1vbrLWLzvDeANVTea by shironeko@fedi.tesaguri.club
       2026-01-04T03:07:53.231040Z
       
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       @gsuberland oh you mean raytracing all the lights
       
 (DIR) Post #B1vcFOSgiPDGEmG6RU by gsuberland@chaos.social
       2026-01-04T03:08:49Z
       
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       @shironeko imagine you're putting LED strips on a house, running on the tops of fences and around windows and across the roof. model that house with basic primitives and recreate the LED strip placement, and that's basically what I'm rendering. there may be 10k+ LEDs.
       
 (DIR) Post #B1vcFPHjec2un68s0e by shironeko@fedi.tesaguri.club
       2026-01-04T03:12:12.250766Z
       
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       @gsuberland I wonder if signed distance field is the solution here, given that it is a static scene.
       
 (DIR) Post #B1vrzHSiZPFVA6byBk by gsuberland@chaos.social
       2026-01-04T03:13:49Z
       
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       @shironeko for the geometry itself I've been using instanced mesh rendering because that part makes it trivial, but the lighting part is hard.
       
 (DIR) Post #B1vrzIe6AZwkpgwZZA by shironeko@fedi.tesaguri.club
       2026-01-04T06:08:33.325495Z
       
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       @gsuberland yeah I think godot have SDF GI where it does the global illumination dynamically.