Stylized Raytracing Demo
Dynamic DDGI, no baked lighting. The counter reads 811 FPS at 1440p native on an RTX 4080 Super.
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Why stylized ray tracing
Ray tracing is usually presented as a photorealism feature, which leads stylized projects to skip it. That is a mistake. What ray tracing actually provides is correct light transport, and stylized rendering benefits from correct light transport just as much — arguably more, because stylized art tends to use strong, deliberate lighting where screen-space artefacts are conspicuous.
Specifically:
Ray-traced feature | What it gives stylized work |
|---|---|
Reflections of off-screen geometry, which screen-space reflections cannot produce | |
Contact-accurate shadows without shadow map resolution and bias tuning | |
Colour bleed that reinforces a limited palette rather than fighting it | |
Grounded contact without the halos screen-space AO produces |
Combining ray-traced lighting with the Toon shading model is well supported in Vite — Toon is one of the custom shading models the fork adds.
What to look at
Turn ray-traced reflections off and on in the demo. The difference is largest exactly where screen-space reflections fail: reflections of things outside the frame, at grazing angles, and behind the camera.
Then look at how the stylized materials respond to the ray-traced lighting rather than to a baked approximation of it. The lighting is doing work the art direction can rely on being consistent as the camera moves.