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Next gen Lighting

Hi,
So I have an interview coming up, and while I have most of the skills required, one area I feel I might be weak in that they are asking for is "help deliver our next-generation lighting solutions."

I understand PBR, I don't know if that is enough. But I'm not sure where to start. Can anyone provide me with any links or info for next gen lighting?




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  • leleuxart
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    leleuxart polycounter lvl 10
    -There's better hardware, so you can use more lights, even more so if the engine is Deferred.

    - More dynamic, shadow casting lights, including a more dynamic time of day/weather system.

    - Better GI, whether it's real-time like CE3 or pre-baked like UE4.

    - Better SSAO/SSDO/any other form of directional occlusion.

    - More environment probes for accurate reflections.

    - Area lights

    The PBR materials will play a big part though, when considering the quality of lighting. If you haven't already, I'd check out Crytek's "Shining The Light On Crysis 3" presentation. I think the KZ:SF presentation has some lighting info too.
  • radiancef0rge
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    radiancef0rge ngon master
    leleuxart wrote: »
    -There's better hardware, so you can use more lights, even more so if the engine is Deferred.

    Not really true, in most differed engines anything over 3 overlapping lights tanks the performance.

    Also HDR which provides some more accurate bloom effects, but thats been around for a while and you could fake it before pretty easily.

    Spherical Harmonics light probes can also increased the accuracy of your GI - but that has also been around for a while.

    Theres definitely a dramatic increase in speed and efficiency of workflow. You may have to bake your lighting for performance eventually but you can visualize close to what youre going to get before having to bake.

    I dont know if you would include this in lighting or rendering but localized realtime reflections are quite cool as well, and you can see some of that in KSF and ISS
  • leleuxart
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    leleuxart polycounter lvl 10
    Not really true, in most differed engines anything over 3 overlapping lights tanks the performance.


    I guess that's true. I'm only basing it off of my experience with CE, which handles a decent amount of overlapping lights fairly well, even without the Irradiance Volumes.
  • Ark
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    Ark polycounter lvl 11
    MGS:Ground Zeros also has a fair amount off overlapping lights with contact shadows.
    I wouldn't take it to the extremes anyways, because once you have a lot of contact shadows, it just adds visual clutter.

    Personally Id love to see more proper 3d volumetric stuff and not the crappy 2d post-process effect we have in most engines for light-shafts.
  • ofca
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    ofca polycounter lvl 9
    leleuxart wrote: »
    I guess that's true. I'm only basing it off of my experience with CE, which handles a decent amount of overlapping lights fairly well, even without the Irradiance Volumes.

    Well not really. CE before Ryse (don't know engine in Ryse version) can't handle few light overlaping over each other. And I'm talking about PS3 and X360. Our lighting artist have a lot of problems with that.
  • leleuxart
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    leleuxart polycounter lvl 10
    ofca wrote: »
    Well not really. CE before Ryse (don't know engine in Ryse version) can't handle few light overlaping over each other. And I'm talking about PS3 and X360. Our lighting artist have a lot of problems with that.

    Well of course they do, you're talking about the PS3 and 360. This thread is about 'next-gen' lighting. What I was saying in my original post was that we can use more lights in a scene, with some overlapping and not drop down to 2 FPS immediately. I'm not saying everything is perfect now and we can use as many lights as we want, but it's a lot more forgiving.

    If we're talking about shadow casting lights, then yeah, that's a different story.
  • Mordin
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    Thanks. Its been really interesting reading up on these. KZ:SF and Crysis3 were good articles (not sure what ISS was, too many acronyms these days! I kept thinking of ISS football!). I found a good one on Remember Me too.
  • radiancef0rge
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    radiancef0rge ngon master
  • marks
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    marks greentooth
  • jRocket
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    jRocket polycounter lvl 18
    Marmoset has a good rundown of physical based shading with links for further reading.
    https://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-theory

    Another good one is this collection of articles from Siggraph 2013 http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2013-shading-course/
  • radiancef0rge
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    radiancef0rge ngon master
    Im pretty positive that hes not asking for physically based shading explanations. I think hes asking for lighting stuff

    Heres a link to BSI technical lighting info

    http://solid-angle.blogspot.com/2014/03/bioshock-infinite-lighting.html
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