Light theory....best ways of learning it.....

Bronco

Howdy

Just wondering what the best way of learning light theory is?.

Im not talking about texture painting here either,but more todo with scenes and ways of presenting lights in a possible game enviroment liek a street or corridor or soemthing.

for example,I walk down a street at night,you have light from street lamps,light from cars,lights from self illuminating objects,light from the moon etc....now if I modelled a street enviroment and wanted to light it,I feel overwelmed and very unsure what to do to make it look realistic but not over the top.

Any advsie on this matter would be much appreciated

john

Rick Stirling

It depends....

Thats a great way of starting an answer, but its true. It dpends on the engine, and what its capable of, how many lights it can have etc. In the real world each street light is its own entity, and like you said, each of those creates light that bounces off the road, houses etc. Its impossible to do that in in a game engine.

The last time I worked on environments we lit it all in max using complex lighting, then baked the lighting into lightmaps. Then we deleted the lights from the scene and in the editor we placed a few lights that didnt effect the environment, just the characters and props. Thi is a fudge, but on the PS2 it was enough.

Then for lights like bulbs, neon signs etc. we used a bloom effect to pretend there was a glow there.

FatAssasin

Learning light theory, and learning how to create realistic lighting within a game engine are kind of two different things. First you learn what it takes to create realistic and interesting (not necessarily realistic) lighting, and then learn the limits of whatever particular engine you're using and apply your knowledge of lighting in general to work within the engine.

Here's a great book that combines both things, it's geared towards achieving natural lighting effects in a 3D app, and many of the concepts can be also applied to a game engine.

Digital Lighting & Rendering