hi John! you know a lot more about this stuff than I do. is it possible they just haven't implemented a full PBR pipeline for this demo/screenshot, or do you think this (the differences in the two screenshots) is more an indication of what would likely be areas for future development?
They seem to have implemented everything that the "bistro" scene calls for. I don't know if those hanging colored lights emit light, though. Rend3/WGPU doesn't handle large numbers of light sources yet. But you wouldn't see them in daylight anyway, because this is high dynamic range rendering, and, as in real life, those light are dim relative to the sun.
Here's the same scene in Godot.[1] This was modified a bit, and has accurate values for the lamp illumination. So they are totally washed out by the sun.
And here it is in several other renderers, with a video.[2]
The original scene was in .fbx, from Amazon's "Lumberyard" project. [3] That project started as the Crysis engine, was bought by Amazon, spun off as open source, was renamed
Open 3D Engine, and is still getting Github changes, so it's not dead.
There are many open source game engines. Most of them get stuck at "mostly works, not ready for prime time". That's where the problems get hard and fixing them stops being fun.
