Just Cause 2 lighting model?
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Anyone here work at Avalanche, or anyone know what the light rig is for Just Cause 2. I'm seeing all this indirect lighting in the game and I'd really like to know how they are getting it? I'm assuming the world is way to big to bake lightmaps on and I don't see any dxt artifacting in the lighting. At first I thought it was a vertex occlusion bake but there is colour in the indirect lighting which I just can't figure out. Are they doing some fancy pants spherical harmonic, or are they using the crysis one bounce from the sun thing?
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Doesn't the game have a full day/night cycle? Cant see there being any lightmaps used in conjunction with that.
Direct lighting is probably like you say, one direct light to simulate the sun/moon that cast shadows. They probably use deferred lighting as well which gives them the option to use a lot more bounce/fill lights.
Mostly assumptions, but thats my take.
Crazybutcher I've seen that paper before quite some time ago, they are definately not doing this in Just Cause 2 since that stuff is all screen space.
also humus (graphics coder there) states on his blog several issues you have to think of when doing ssao on xbox due to the edram framebuffer.
screen space has the inherent benefit of being independent from the complexity of the scene, and there's already some xbox360 ssao implementations out there.
also Could you post a url for that blog?
http://gpupro.blogspot.com/
after further reading there, it looks like they indeed don't use SSAO but occlusion volumes
Now I actually recall pictures of that effect in some publication I saw lately, just don't remember the exact name.
http://research.nvidia.com/publication/ambient-occlusion-volumes
but thats not the one I meant, I guess there was a gdc presentation on just cause as well
... or not, but anyway somewhere I have seen that image of a soldier standing next to a wall and the skeleton had occlusion volumes linked to it (squashed spheres and capsules I think) that would approximate the ao volume
but I dont think I have seen it mentioned here
http://developer.amd.com/documentation/presentations/Pages/default.aspx
or here
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/gdc-2010.html
Brice Vandemoortele the easiest way to tell something's not in screen space is move the camera around and if the effect's not changing each frame it's not screen space. That and when you move the character in front of something there is a halo of no ssao around them.
cheap smokes and spangly mirrors used to good effect...from what i can tell...of course could be wrong