Playing Relaxing Nature Video As Textured Rectangular Light In Wicked Engine

As János Turánszki, the creator of Wicked Engine, shared, this solution from Frostbite supports both shadow maps and ray-traced shadows, originally introduced in the SIGGRAPH 2014 presentation "Moving Frostbite to Physically Based Rendering." However, the developer strongly recommended checking out Alex Tardif's implementation, which is more direct and simplified.

We recently demonstrated Wicked Engine managing 50 simultaneous Matrix video streams, each at 720p HD resolution, displayed across a wall of 2000 screens. János has now released a sample showcasing how to leverage Vulkan, DirectX 12, and DirectX 11 graphics APIs to utilize video decoder hardware.

This approach leverages the GPU's native resource types, making it ideal for games already utilizing these resources. Applying decoded videos as textures is as simple as using any other texture while still benefiting from optimized video compression codecs without needing an external library. Also, GPU video decoding allows full access to async compute, enabling video decoding and other rendering tasks to run in parallel for optimal performance. For a complete example, check out Wicked Engine, which implements async video decoding and uses video textures for materials and lighting in the 3D world.

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