My CE3 Questions

snow

Instead of spamming this forum with CE3 questions (as I know I will develop many), I've decided just to make a thread of all my embarassing questions.

I'll start off with this pickle.

1. Integrated imaged based lighting. What is this exactly? Is this a better alternative to cubemapping? It looks to be just the result of a high gloss value? Is this the same as "realtime local reflections"?

How does this relate to the sphere's I see (ie in the tech demo and all throughout the crysis 2 levels)?

Thanks guys.

[HP]

Sure, I'll make sure I help if time permits

Regarding the image based-lighting, In the editor, there's an entity called "Environment Probe". You set a radius and generate a cubemap, and when you activate it, the ambient lighting and reflections are "synched" with the cubemap.

Example: Here a trailer and a sphere with a completely black material, high specularity and glossiness.



With env probe:





That sphere you were talking and you see everywhere in Crysis 2 levels is just a sphere brush with a black difuse, white spec and 255 255 255 gloss, so It's a perfect mirror. It's the environment probe that does the cubemap magic.

snow

Thanks HP, so once you setup your environment probe, anything with high gloss value will use the environment probes cubemap by default, and I also assume you can only have one environment probe per map?

In that case, how do I achieve real time reflections in CE3?

[HP]

No, you can have as many environment probes as you like, hence the radios thing in there. You can make a probe for the entire level of course, just put 5000 or somethign in the radios and it will affect the whole level.
But say you're working on interiors, you can use a probe for each room, in fact, you should, just set the correct radios settings for each probe.

This will do nearly the same job as real time reflections.

To have actual real time reflections, you have to use the DX11 patch and of course a DX11 gfx card. Cubemaps get the job done for the majority of the environments and it's way cheaper.

IxenonI

The realtime reflections will not reflect everything in your scene, just the stuff that is already rendered. They are cut off at a certain distance as well, so you should always use a cubemap in addition.