A HUGE rendering feature that should be adding to bring more impressive experience in Nomad

Feature Request
1

I’ve been using Nomad for more than 3 years now especially for everything like environmental rendering and creating 3D models of objects. Its rendering features are impressive similar like desktop quality. But it has some flaws in terms of screen space reflection (only renders what’s currently displayed on the screen, not the whole scene), refraction (no caustics), point lighting shadow (screen spce only, no shadow map), limited HDRI resolution (capped at 1K and converts everything to Radiance HDR), dynamic range and bit depth (only indexed color 8 bit png) and no displacement map. Phones are becoming more and more powerful over the years but still Nomad mostly uses GPU rendering and some rendering engines like Blender can utilize both CPU or GPU for rendering.

I found this photon mapping engine which I think would be good for Android device especially with non ray tracing hardware and probably could utilize both CPU and GPU rendering: GitHub - yumcyaWiz/photon_mapping: minimal but extensible header only implementation of photon mapping in C++

In fact, that rendering engine has caustics rendering and indirect lighting with final gathering which maybe suited for high-end showcase and visualization. In photon map shader, there is no option for reflection, global illumination and ambient occlusion that might ruin the original algorithm. There is also no option to control shadow bias

Guys, would it be a great idea if photon mapping would be the fourth shading mode alongside with PBR (real-time), MatCap and Unlit?

2

Would it be also great if:

  • HDRI resolution increased to 8K (8192*4096) and for exr does not suffer from Radiance HDR conversion
  • Displacement map is added to show deformations on object surface with optimizations on the number of polygon count
  • And lastly, true RGB (not indexed) 16-bit png with logarithmic profile and color spce allowing for deeper dynamic range but you cannot change saturation and contrast value if logarithmic profile is choosen to prevent banding artefacts as well as highlight clipping
  • The maximum number of lights increased to 24 instead of 4 with emissive objects can be set to area light (only for photon map shading option)