Rendering in games!

easterislandnick

Hi, Quite a broad question but what rendering method is used in games? Are they still Gouraud shaded or are new algorithms being used these days?

leilei

Depends on 'generation'. Goraud shading is used mostly in games that don't have a real-time lighting system (i.e. almost everything prior to id tech 4). Nowadays it's usually a cubemap projection with a crapload of texture memory hogged just to get the stuff to shade and shine right.

low odor

I'm pretty sure UE3 uses Phong

Michael Knubben

Leilei obviously knows much more about writing engines than the people at Epic and id, which is why he's the highly revered genius behind the latest hardhitting impressive engine known as: err...

Remind me again, please?

Ofcourse I mean to be a dick, but seriously, lighten up eh?

CrazyButcher

Gouraud shaded, is lighting based on vertices. And color is interpolated across a triangle.

that may still be used in games. Mostly lower-end stuff, like world of warcraft, or portable games. Or when you have lots of small stuff (small objects in RTS).

often the issue was that lighting quality depended on tesselation of an object.

Often current games will do lighting based on pixel. which looks better and allows normals (used for lighting) to be changed on per-pixel basis (normalmaps).

both lighting styles are often derived from Phong model.

Eric Chadwick

Lots of cool new methods are being used these days.

Spherical Harmonics, similar to the light probes used in Half Life 2.

Non-Photorealistic Rendering in Team Fortress 2 (300K pdf)

Directional lightmapping used in Resistance: Fall of Man. Basically lightmaps are encoded with not just color but also directional info, so bumpmapped surfaces get directional lighting from the baked lightmaps. Pretty cool.

Deferred Shading in Killzone 2. (9MB pdf)

Global Illumination by Illumination Labs is being added to various games.

etc.

The hardware just keeps getting better.