Uncharted 3
- Thread starter corduroygt
- Start date
http://n4g.com/news/674924/watch-the-extended-uncharted-3-trailer/com
The water looked so amazing, must be some kind of advanced dynamic fluid system. And the lighting in that desert, OMG...
The water looked so amazing, must be some kind of advanced dynamic fluid system. And the lighting in that desert, OMG...
RenegadeRocks
Legend
Is there a better quality version of that?
The desert part in the end looks too good to be true.
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/ces-11-uncharted-3/709029
Much better than the previous link but still compressed. The desert scene looks too real for video game
.
Also does it look like some kind of secondary light bounce on their arms?
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RenegadeRocks
Legend
THey must have put a non shadow casting light from below to simulate the look of sunlight bouncing from the sand.
With such uniform lighting as that in a desert, I'd consider a selectively applied (occlusion) spherical illumination map meself. It depends how it behaves walking in and out of shadow.
L. Scofield
Veteran
Uncharted 2 already has lightmapped GI, doesn't it?
RenegadeRocks
Legend
I was thinking a cube map too. But , yeah spherical is great, but I didn't know spherical maps are used in games. We use spherical maps with MR all the time in CG.
@L.Scofield: you mean GI baked into lightmaps? But wouldn't that be only for environments and not affect anything moving? For anything moving to interact with GI one would need RT light bounce calculation, won't we ? What I do on the CG side usually is that I bake the GI solution in the environment, to reduce final rendertimes( akin to lightmaps) and then use a panoramic render of the environment to provide ambient light to the characters ( like what Shifty mentioned) complemented by lights for bright sources. But then I fake specific light bounce from environment onto character by adding additional lights in specific scenes like when the character comes close to a wall or a bright coloured object. Thats on case to case basis, something we can't do in games as we can't really cover all areas.
L. Scofield
Veteran
You're thinking baked to textures. Lightmaps can and do shade dynamic objects. No light bounces off dynamic objects though.
Lightmass in UDK makes GI lightmaps that affect both static and dynamic geometry, for example.
RenegadeRocks
Legend
You mean its more of a 3D volume that is stored ! Rather than a light info for a flat 2D surface. GI solutions that I store in CG are points based on the geometry surface. So if the geometry moves, the light solution doesn't , and we get an artifact. So the baked GI solution affects only static objects. What I understand of lightmaps is that they are textures with just the light info. I mean, thats how we use them i. CG , if we do. I believe that is how the behave in games too.
What you say seems to be more like a volume, wherein, if any object comes inside that volume, it gets affected. That sounds like the description of a light itself.
L. Scofield
Veteran
Well I'm not expert of course, but maybe the definition has evolved or maybe I'm just wrong xD But to be clear, what I meant is that U2 used precomputed lighting information to shade the environment and characters with a GI look.
Here's an in-depth look at Lightmass:
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Lightmass.html
Here's an in-depth look at Lightmass:
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Lightmass.html
Not necessarily a volume, but you can include all sorts of useful information in the texture that you can use to create lighting effects, which is what gamse with sophisticated lighting can do. However, my point is in a desert you don't need that information! For those scenes with the secondary lighting, a simple texturing shader could add a feel of glare from the sand and it'd look pretty good everywhere, and be extremely cheap. The moment you'd go into an area with shadow though, you'd want a more complex lighting system if you were going for top draw (like Uncharted does) and would have to go with lightmaps or something.
I suppose realistically, if they're using lightmaps for the complex levels, they'd use the same in the open desert levels and not write a simple little trick, especially when there's even less reason to save resources when you have such bland environments!
RenegadeRocks
Legend
Yes, a shader effect to give a value (brighter) to any normal pointing downwards is even cheaper. I understand that, what I don't is what L. Scofield said:
How do lightmaps affect moving objects. Lets say I am using lightmaps to create a GI effect where light bounce off the ground and can be seen on a wall. I store that in lightmaps and apply them on the wall. But if a character comes close to that ground, the bounced light is obviously not going to affect him as it is just stored in the light map of the wall texture.
Have light maps evolved over time ? something I missed cos what I understood from his post is that Lightmaps can affect moving geometry too. Something I don't see How it can happen when I use render to textures for my GI solution for a game level.
How do lightmaps affect moving objects. Lets say I am using lightmaps to create a GI effect where light bounce off the ground and can be seen on a wall. I store that in lightmaps and apply them on the wall. But if a character comes close to that ground, the bounced light is obviously not going to affect him as it is just stored in the light map of the wall texture.
Have light maps evolved over time ? something I missed cos what I understood from his post is that Lightmaps can affect moving geometry too. Something I don't see How it can happen when I use render to textures for my GI solution for a game level.
It's pretty common to use volume of light probes for a moving geometry.
This nice little .pdf describes the method in KZ2.
True, but that is the most common way to bake lighting for moving objects.
There has been some volumetric lightmaps with directional information which is used for all objects. (3d texture with each texel having light information for several directions.)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...f9-ae4d-464c-9b40-9550c0aea3ec&displaylang=en
http://copypastepixel.blogspot.com/2010/06/towards-lighting-volumes-and-away-from.html
I think there's just a different of interpretation of the term here. Looks like some people think of lightmaps as purely the scenery lighting baked into textures, whereas other use lightmap to describe any illumination data held in texture like spherical harmonics. both Laa-Yosh and RenegadeRocks are coming at this from a CG position, where I guess lightmaps are solely the baked lighting calculations. I think these days in realtime graphics, anything that maps precalculated lighting information throughout the scene is talked of as a lightmap; that's certainly what I think of when I hear 'lightmap.'
RenegadeRocks
Legend
I think thats why I misunderstood stuff. You have got my viewpoint correct. My idea of lightmap is lighting baked into a texture.
