What is Lys?
With the ability to convert, manipulate and tweak your source images in real-time, generate Radiance, Irradiance and Specular textures on the fly and choose between Cosine weighted, GGX and Gaussian specular terms with fully automated BRDF convolved MIP maps with user configurable varying Specular Power or Roughness, Lys can help give you the tools and functionality that you need to ensure that your project’s HDR Image based lighting pipeline is the best that it can be.
Real-time cross conversion between panoramic, Sphere and cube maps
Due to the nature of specular convolution and the awkwardness of 3d cube maps it is extremely difficult and often impossible to accurately generate or manipulate these images within 2d image editors without introducing errors into your pipeline. With the addition of Lys it is now possible to seamlessly convert your content back and forth into an editable layout, such as a panorama (longitude/latitude), make your changes and then reimport back into Lys for processing.
Real-time axis rotation and Cube map face position debugging
Cosine weighted, GGX and Gaussian specular terms
Our best in class Specular convolution has full support for Cosine weighted, GGX and Gaussian specular terms so you can be sure that everything conforms to current physically based industry standards, allowing you to integrate it into your workflow seamlessly with the full confidence that you are getting the absolute best quality possible for your project’s needs.
Never before has specular convolution been so fast or easy to use!
BRDF convolved MIP maps with user configurable varying specular power/roughness
Lys has fully automated BRDF convolved MIP maps with user configurable varying Specular Power or Roughness to achieve HDR image based lighting in real-time graphics.
Upon generation of the specular texture Lys automatically calculates the correct specular/roughness level for each MIP individually, based on a choice of power drops, without any ugly seams as you go down the MIP chain.
Physically based Roughness & Specular power
Roughness and Specular Power are both fully supported and instantly cross convertible within Lys at the push of a button. Simply select your preferred standard and you are good to go!
Instant Irradiance generation with spherical harmonic coefficients export
In tandem with the ultra-fast specular convolution Lys instantly generates Irradiance for you chosen image and even supports export for spherical harmonic coefficients triplets in text based or floating point .tiff flavours.
Spherical harmonic coefficients present an extremely low cost method of generating noiseless, high quality Irradiance by effectively reducing the footprint to a single 9×1 floating point texture map and helping you to keep memory free for other content, while simultaneously helping to ensure that the quality demands of current generation content are met.
Versatile image adjustment
Tweak the hue, saturation and exposure of your images while retaining the precious HDR data.
Physically based procedural sky generation
Direct3D 11 texture block compression on DirectX 11+ GPUs
Being the first ever compressed format to fully support high dynamic range source data on the GPU, BC6H is now the format to use for HDR content within in the current generation of content.
Especially useful for HDR probes, BC6H handles gradients extremely well and has an outstanding compression ratio of 8-1 (12.5%).
BC7 is the first ever compressed format to accurately represent 8 bit (per channel) images with very marginal loss. Both gradients and discontinuities are handled excellently and when coupled with a compression ratio of 4-1 (25%) BC7 is the perfect solution for authoring high quality art.
User configurable Export
With unprecedented user control over export in Lys it’s possible to automatically calculate and populate the optimum export resolution of Radiance, Irradiance and Specular based of the size of the imported image, or if you so choose, you can individually configure the dimensions yourself for all layout types including per face size for cube maps!
Best in class high precision work flow
All calculations & processing are performed in single precision floating point (float32).
Pixel perfect 8, 16 and 32bit support
Our robust 8, 16 and 32bit file I/O and image processing pipeline preserves your high precision data.
All calculations & processing within Lys are performed in single precision floating point (float32). We have painstakingly ensured that with our robust I/O pipeline, with full 8, 16 and 32bit (integer and float) support, you will never suffer from precision drop due to lazy or poor coding and can focus on creating great art!
You can be sure that your data is in good hands with Lys!
