![]() All your favorite test elements like lasers, excursion funnels and light bridges now cast light, moving and extending along with the element. We’re now able to more strongly ground common elements in the world by having them cast lights dynamically. This is crucial for a game like Desolation. This also has the benefit of allowing lights to move and change color/intensity in the level, making it possible for us to choreograph more sophisticated, dynamic scenes with lighting. As a result, lights can now be placed and moved around in-game, making it simple for artists to quickly iterate on designs. Lights are now completely real-time with per-pixel shadow maps, with no computation done by the compiler. We’ve introduced a physically-based renderer that unifies and drives shading of all surfaces in the world. Here’s how we addressed these challenges. With our engine overhaul, we canned the Source model and rebuilt it from the ground up. Source’s surface definition is fairly binary: surfaces are either shiny or not, and conveying differences in material types like cloth, metal and plastic was challenging.This often produces poorer, less consistent results, especially when placing world geometry next to models. ![]() ![]() ![]() Source handles lighting for world geometry and models differently, using lightmaps for the former and per-vertex lighting for the latter.The static nature of lightmaps also makes it impossible for lights to move and change with their environment. This made iteration very time-consuming, and was inconvenient for our art team all around. While the results of this were generally accurate in-game, it was normal for this process to take hours of time. Lights were placed by artists outside of the game, in a separate editor with no previewing capability.Using this method, we faced three major problems: With the traditional Source rendering pipeline, lighting is pre-computed and baked into maps via lightmaps during a lengthy compilation process using Valve’s radiosity simulator (VRAD).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |