Michael Khaimzon, who worked on Far Cry and Crysis, shared that they were unable to make realistic light scattering in Far Cry, so they made a fake lighting texture for both sides of leaves.

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Bent Normals in Godot 4.5:

The first one is the new Bent Normals setup, the right one is without Bent Normals.

1. The new feature allows much better lighting with fairly cheap self-shadowing and no light leaking. It's still worse than RT, but much better than just Ambient Occlusion.

2. It's being used with AO, not as the replacement of it. Inside the shader I don't even have extra maps, I use Normal and AO + scaling to make Bent Normals.

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