Exclude certain lights from a deferred pass

The title is pretty self-explanatory. Is it possible to exclude certain lights from a deferred lightvolumes pass?

Not without modifying the engine to add a new attribute to the Light class for example.

You can use the low 8 bits of the light mask to exclude objects from receiving deferred light (uses stencil test), but this will still render the volume.

EDIT: checking the light mask for having all zeroes in the low 8 bits would be an easy way to skip a deferred light completely, without having to add anything to Light class. This would be a rather trivial change.

That change is in the master branch now.

Oh, nice! Thank you so much.

I’m working on an SSAO filter and I want it to affect only the ambient lighting. Problem is, I like to use 3 directional “fill lights” in addition to an ambient term, to give some more depth to the shadows. So I wanted to render the ambient term and fill lights in one pass, apply SSAO, then render in the direct lights. Which I can do now, thanks to you. But now I have a new problem. It looks like the depth buffer is not being properly cleared with the clear command (those streaking artifacts are the result of leftover data in the depth buffer):

This is my RenderPath XML file.

<renderpath> <rendertarget name="albedo" sizedivisor="1 1" format="rgba" /> <rendertarget name="normal" sizedivisor="1 1" format="rgba" /> <rendertarget name="depth" sizedivisor="1 1" format="lineardepth" /> <command type="clear" color="fog" depth="1.0" stencil="0" /> <command type="scenepass" pass="deferred" marktostencil="true" vertexlights="true" metadata="gbuffer"> <output index="0" name="viewport" /> <output index="1" name="albedo" /> <output index="2" name="normal" /> <output index="3" name="depth" /> </command> <command type="lightvolumes" vs="DeferredLight" ps="DeferredLight"> <texture unit="albedo" name="albedo" /> <texture unit="normal" name="normal" /> <texture unit="depth" name="depth" /> </command> <command type="scenepass" pass="postopaque" /> <command type="scenepass" pass="refract"> <texture unit="environment" name="viewport" /> </command> <command type="scenepass" pass="alpha" vertexlights="true" sort="backtofront" metadata="alpha" /> <command type="scenepass" pass="postalpha" sort="backtofront" /> <command type="quad" tag="SSAO" vs="SSAO" ps="SSAO" output="viewport"> <texture unit="diffuse" name="viewport" /> <texture unit="depth" name="depth" /> <texture unit="normal" name="normal" /> </command> </renderpath>
Any idea what the problem could be?

You could add an additional clear command in the renderpath (clear only works for the index 0 color target, not for multiple targets) or render a fullscreen quad with a custom shader to initialize the whole G-buffer to the wanted values at once.