PathMax

PathMax 1

First public release. What went into it, newest first.

Defaults and Specular GI

• The pack now ships a hand-tuned configuration instead of a neutral one: a night-heavy look with heavy light pollution, strong volumetrics, short-range reflections and cheaper block light. Pick Balanced for the old reference values.
• Specular GI is no longer optional. With it off, every smooth surface falls back to a flat sky probe, and a path tracer whose reflections can't see the traced world isn't the thing this pack is. Potato narrows its reach instead of switching it off.

Coloured light through stained glass

• Light through a stained glass window now arrives coloured on the floor, in the volumetric shaft, in water reflections, and on everything the bounce reaches after it. Previously the beam stopped dead at the pane while a coloured patch glowed on the floor below it.
• Pane thickness is one exponent applied to the stored transmission, which is Beer-Lambert exactly — so a thicker pane deepens the colour and dims the total in the right proportion. The floor under a rose window is coloured and darker, which a saturation slider can't give you.
• Both the shaft and the bounce can be switched off independently if you want the cheap version.

Light pollution

• A town over the hill, at night. The glow stands on the horizon as a dome rather than sitting on it as a spot, gets bluer as it climbs, and is not even around the compass — one to three sources at fixed world bearings, so it stays put as you travel and swings as you turn.
• Overcast multiplies it rather than hiding it. A cloud deck reflects back down what would otherwise escape, so a cloudy night in a city is brighter and more orange than a clear one.
• Stars are drowned, not covered: raising the sky background removes the faint majority first, and the horizon before the zenith.
• Added inside the sky function, so it reaches the dome, the ambient, the fog, the volumetrics, the clouds and every reflection from one place.

Coloured shadows

• Light through stained glass stopped darkening what it passed through, using three shadow buffers the pack already had and wasn't reading. Nearly free: the same number of shadow taps into a different map.

Performance

• Per-frame clear traffic cut from 157 MB to 24 MB — 84% less. Two volumes that existed only to let a voxel reflection sample the real atlas tile became dead weight the moment reflections moved to screen space.
• Denoiser cut from 50 to 27 taps per pixel while increasing its reach, by spending the budget on more passes at a smaller radius instead of fewer wide ones.
• Sun visibility for every path traced bounce now comes from the shadow map rather than a second voxel march — that march was 52% of all the tracer's texture fetches.

Screen-space reflections

• Reflections moved from a voxel trace to a screen-space march. What that buys is colour: the voxel grid holds one averaged value per block re-lit by an approximation, while the colour buffer holds the finished frame. What it costs is everything off screen, so a voxel-trace fallback is still available.
• Refinement, thickness testing and edge fade are all exposed, because reflections that stop on a straight vertical line are the single most recognisable screen-space artefact there is.