The tomorrow children: lighting and mining with voxels

The unique visual look and gameplay envisioned for The Tomorrow Children demanded that we implement real-time Global Illumination (GI) as well as dynamically modifiable landscapes all running at 30hz on the PlayStation 4 console hardware. Users needed to be able to dig holes in fallen monsters and create vast structures all at runtime without any pre-baking and have beautiful GI 100% of the time. To achieve this we used a variant of Voxel Cone Tracing [Crassin et al. 2011] to provide both direct and 3 bounce indirect illumination.