Planet SoC

I have just added support for directional lights on my branch. Using more than one “sun” light may sound weird, but that’s actually how you transform environment maps in a collection of point lights, as each pixel ideally represents an infinitely distant illumination source.
So I couldn’t resist going back to my preliminary tests, but this time running them with the actual code! Here’s Suzanne again under the Eucalyptus Grove light probe:

Please note that the AO image is there just to give a very rough feeling of how the two could compare — of course energy should be matched more carefully and parameters could be tuned better. Comparison with approximate AO would be useful as well.
Here’s another test using a hand-painted environment map:

In both tests the average cut size (the number of lights actually evaluated per pixel) is pretty low — see how dark the false color images appear. On the other hand the shadowing doesn’t look entirely convincing; still, it looks like a good starting point to me!
All images were rendered at OSA 5.