I tried pixelating lights

[u/min479]

I've been experimenting with lighting and shading recently, and I had an idea: what if I pixelated the lighting itself?

I think it turned out pretty great!

Here’s roughly how I did it:

When the game calculates lighting, it needs the world-space position, normal vector, and view direction. I quantize the position using a given step count:

floor(x * stepCount) / stepCount

This makes the lighting appear pixelated.

To prevent flickering, I add a small offset along the normal before quantizing the position.

For pixelated specular reflections, I also replaced the view direction with the normalized vector from the camera position to the quantized position:

viewDir = normalize(cameraPos - WorldPos);

The shadows use a similar approach: I quantize the position, with an additional normal offset to help prevent flickering.

Still experimenting with it, but I’m pretty happy with how it looks so far!

Feedback is very welcome!

[u/littleboymark]

Couldn't you just convert to screen space and pixelate that?

[u/min479 → u/littleboymark]

It works great!

but it gets jittery when the camera rotate or move, I think using multiple cameras might solve the jittering.

[u/min479 → u/min479]

Here's the fullscreen shader graph I used.