Realtime GI is the holy grail of lighting !Being a CG lighting artist for 10 years, I have been dreaming of it ever since Stalker tried it in Shadow of Chernobyl
. In Crysis 2 on PC, if I pick up objects throw, them around, the GI works on the fly on every frame. A car explodes and the light around it changes. Jave been tweaking settings for the GI , increasing and decreasing it, checking colour bleeds and messing around in it.
Static solutions are static solutions, GI is calculated once and baked into light maps. Its like running around in a photograph.Dynamic objects are anyways removed from these calculations as they know player might move these around.
BF3 GI doesn't do much , except for accomodating destruction. And since the destruction is canned, it simply means they have different set of light maps for broken and vanilla objects, thats all. And it doesn't accomodate for flashing or moving lights in any case. As for Spherical Harmonics, KZ also uses it for characters. But , as close as they may come in creating an illusion of real light, nothing can beat a light calculated every frame
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Anyways, I wasn't making a case for realtime GI. Crytek has it implemented, we just have to wait for new hardware, I guess.
