Finished implementing diffuse and specular image-based ambient lighting, and things are looking a lot nicer. This is still without any shadows or AO, so that's next! I also switched to using ACES for tonemapping, which is similar to what I had before but seems a bit nicer.

Whats your stack what's your stack? Are you building this with WebGPU and WGSL, Rust or C++? custom shading and pipeline passes?

I'm using WebGPU (but only really targeting native) via Dawn and C++. The engine is fully custom from the ground up, but with some helpful libraries (like Dawn, Dear ImGui, etc.)

Ok now add the asmr sticky sound 🔥

ACES is nice. What were you using before?

I didn't know much about tonemapping and just slotted in one from this old article to start:

How are you subtracting the spheres from the surface without creating a very large number of volumes that would slow down the rendering?

It is creating a large number of SDF "operations" (as I call them). I'm baking the SDF to volume texture "bricks" so having more operations does slow down (re)baking but not rendering.

How do you do IBL ambient lighting, prefilter cubemap? And all the scene looks like rendering with SDF?

Yeah, I'm doing pretty standard stuff - prefiltering a cubemap once for diffuse, and once for specular. And yes, all geometry is SDF.

Sometimes I find ACES tonemapping to be oversaturated, other times I love it

I will admit I do like the look of saturated darks in particular.