Lighting on Portal 2.

[Mendel]

Quite early on in the game, they start with the moving "hotel room" and show off some real time shadowing. Later on in the game they have you follow Wheatley who has a flashlight in otherwise quite dark room.
Well in fact it is quite ubiquitous but slightly less prominent in the rest of the game.

While not really impressive in the grand scheme of things, actually I was like, good job guys, you made it to the level of Doom 3 engine now. Welcome to 7 years ago!

That said, I think this is still something new to Source engine and it did its job.
Any ideas what kind of technique they´re using? Is there some sort of documentation around?

 

[homerdog]

The shadow tech has been their since Episode 2 I think. At least for the flashlight.

 

[green.pixel]

I think this is all the information (at least, what I could find) there is about it:
http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Env_projectedtexture

 

[Mendel]

Thanks. Interesting. Only one such shadow casting light at any given time and they totally got away with it. I sure didn't realize while playing that there was such a limitation.

 

[Ike Turner]

The really annoying thing is that your gun was never affected by the shadow map.

 

[Colourless]

It would have been amazing if lighting travelled through portals, but using lightmaps that was never going to happen. Light not going through portals is not a particularly noticable issue in the game because there are not a great many number of obviously visible light sources.

On a related note, I find it very disappointing that sound doesn't travel through portals. I really noticed it in a section where a Cave Johnson voice over playing at a specific location in the world. I walked through a portal to a location that was fairly distant and the sound attenuated due to the distance. Its silly but really broke my immersion at that point. Its a shame the sound engine doesn't seem to be aware of the portals

 

[Davros]

theres an ambient occlusion mod
http://www.4shared.com/file/yLofWFSZ/PORTAL2_V3.html

read some details
http://pcformat.techradar.com/blog-entry/grab-portal-2-graphics-mod-27-04-11

 

[Npl]

Quite early on in the game, they start with the moving "hotel room" and show off some real time shadowing. Later on in the game they have you follow Wheatley who has a flashlight in otherwise quite dark room.
Well in fact it is quite ubiquitous but slightly less prominent in the rest of the game.

While not really impressive in the grand scheme of things, actually I was like, good job guys, you made it to the level of Doom 3 engine now. Welcome to 7 years ago!

That said, I think this is still something new to Source engine and it did its job.
Any ideas what kind of technique they´re using? Is there some sort of documentation around?

The lighting in the source-engine is quite good, you cant really compare it to Doom3 which -as whole- looked like a dog compared to the original HL2 and Far Cry anyway (if you think it looks better just turn down brightness in those games until you only see dark schemes and your brain fills in the missing pieces, as soon as you have some lights Doom3 looks like ass). Unified shadow model was just a gimmicky feature, a technically interesting cornercase but impractical in terms of the restrictions it imposed.

 

[zed]

The lighting in the source-engine is quite good, you cant really compare it to Doom3 which -as whole- looked like a dog compared to the original HL2 and Far Cry anyway (if you think it looks better just turn down brightness in those games until you only see dark schemes and your brain fills in the missing pieces, as soon as you have some lights Doom3 looks like ass).

Years ago, someone done a HL2 map in doom3 (i.e. they used HL2 assets) but instead of source engine rendering it the doom3 engine did.
the doom3 engine looked far far better, $100 saiz if you done the reverse (load a doom3 map/assets in source engine) it would look worse

Unified shadow model was just a gimmicky feature, a technically interesting cornercase but impractical in terms of the restrictions it imposed.

gimmicky? how so
true stencil shadows was a bad choice (I think carmack admitted that later mainly cause the game took 1or2 years long to come out than they originally planned) but the idea is sound

 

[Npl]

Years ago, someone done a HL2 map in doom3 (i.e. they used HL2 assets) but instead of source engine rendering it the doom3 engine did.
the doom3 engine looked far far better, $100 saiz if you done the reverse (load a doom3 map/assets in source engine) it would look worse

maybe because the doom3 assets are the problem? which are that way because of the engine which grinds down horribly with geometry complexity.

gimmicky? how so
true stencil shadows was a bad choice (I think carmack admitted that later mainly cause the game took 1or2 years long to come out than they originally planned) but the idea is sound

Yeah, I primary meant Doom3`s implementation of it. Of course having everything lit (and shadowed) is the theoretical optimum, but realtime graphics is very much about using good tricks to archive similar results. There will always be cases were 1 approach is superior to another.

 

[zed]

maybe because the doom3 assets are the problem? which are that way because of the engine which grinds down horribly with geometry complexity.

I think its more that the textures in HL2 are of much higher quality.
Also because of the stencil shadows doom had to limit the number of polygons of objects, thus things would be more 'blocky' than otherwise