Fixing Reflections in realism-effects SSGI: Ground is brighter when looking up
While integrating the realism-effects library into our WebGL-based rendering pipeline with my colleague Oguzhan Kalkuz , we encountered an issue where the ground materials—particularly those using PBR—appeared unnaturally bright when the camera was tilted slightly away from the ground plane. The texture was still present, but it was overriden by reflections, resulting in a washed-out or glowing appearance. This post walks through our debugging process, what we learned about screen-space global illumination (SSGI), and how we resolved the issue by modifying shader behavior. Understanding realism-effects and SSGI The realism-effects is a powerful and modular set of post-processing effects for three.js , authored by 0beqz . It includes implementations for: Screen-Space Global Illumination (SSGI) Ray-Traced Screen-Space Reflections (SSR) Temporal accumulation and filtering Screen-space indirect lighting and ambient occlusion SSGI is a technique that approximates...