Enlighten real-time radiosity
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This is a bit of old news, but their tech is so awesome it's worth another look.
Videos here, especially check out the workflow one. :poly128:
http://www.geomerics.com/enlighten-media.htm
Some making-of info from the graphics house Geomerics contracted for the demo assets.
http://slidelondon.com/06
Videos here, especially check out the workflow one. :poly128:
http://www.geomerics.com/enlighten-media.htm
Some making-of info from the graphics house Geomerics contracted for the demo assets.
http://slidelondon.com/06
Replies
'Real-time' radiosity however, yeesh. Now please?
Neither is the post proccess AO....... I don't think. Actually i am unsure.
Really impressive stuff. Like hellobuddy mentioned, I would be interested to see how this handles in large open areas. But the tech is awesome.
-caseyjones
Exciting stuff
Now show me a demo of a modern building interior with lots of shiny bumpy things using that lighting. If they can do that then they will have allot more sales. As is it looks like a dynamically lit Prince of Persia game.
Anyways the future is bright for artists, no more baking lightmaps and creating lightmap uvs
Howmany games are out today that support deferred rendering? I only know of Crysis and GRAW&GRAW2 for pc. I think stalker has one too but i'm not sure.
Thegodzero: normalmaps arnt a problem with a deferred renderer, they actually look alot better becuase alot more specular points at thesame time are possible.
Some papers with nice images...
Killzone 2 (8MB PDF).
http://www.guerrilla-games.com/publications/dr_kz2_rsx_dev07.pdf
STALKER (8MB PDF).
http://www.4a-games.com/209_gems2_ch09.pdf
http://www.tml.tkk.fi/~janne/wrt/
An interesting paper on fast calculation of indirect lighting, could be a similar method to this. Or might be completely different, but still interesting
indirect lighting takes the scene's geometry into account, whilst deferred shading can only lit what is "visible" in the current frame.
With deferred shading the main benefit is indeed that you can do multiple lights on screen at much lower costs. The major drawback is that you only have a fixed set of input paramemters to the shading (normal, position, speccolor, diffusecolor..) that are the same for all surfaces. And as all attributes can only be stored once per pixel, there is no complex transparency, ie transparent surfaces have to be drawn in simpler fashion.
Which means you are very limited in the way you shade things, you dont have as much freedom in different shaders.
Crysis does not use deferred shading in the classic sense, but they use a hybrid approach, certain things are done in screenspace (shadows are collected and applied later), but a lot is still done in regular rendering, where those screenspace maps are used. But the information is not applied like in classic deferred shading, as seen in killzone2, or tabula rasa.
indirect lighting is a different story, as the transport of light is computed for a scene. The fact that light can bounce around means the geometry that is not visible has to be used as well. Ie that is very different from def. shading.
it will take a while until complex material setups as seen in ue3/crysis can go along with techniques presented here. But it's just a matter of time
Yeah Peris it does seem so, better performance than traditional multipass lighting. The killzone2 and stalker papers both go into detail about advantages/disavantages of deferred shading.
Oh and I remembered STALKER did have helicopters flying around, so there were moving vehicles. But they were so high and fast though that it wasn't clear if they were lit the same way as the rest.
hence my hint about not mixing up those techniques, that realtime radiosity stuff is different kind of technology. Whether the shading is "deferred" or not is another decision.
The phrase "real-time radiosity" is both over-used and abused in the graphics literature. For use in a game, computing radiosity at 10 frames per second (fps) is simply not good enough. For a lighting technique to be practical then in isolation it must be hitting well over 100fps, so that when it is incorporated into a complete solution, rates of 60fps can be achieved. Enlighten easily fulfils these performance requirements.