Vertex Lighting vs Non Vertex Lighting in TGE
by Kevin Ostrowski · in Torque Game Engine · 09/23/2003 (4:10 pm) · 3 replies
Can someone give me the rundown on differences between having Vertex Lighting enabled vs. having it disabled? The only visual difference I notice is that env maps no longer work on dif files when vertex lighting is on..
Is vertex lighting a more realistic lighting solution? I would think it's lighting every vertex separately instead of lighting the entire face... am I way off here?
Is vertex lighting a more realistic lighting solution? I would think it's lighting every vertex separately instead of lighting the entire face... am I way off here?
#2
09/24/2003 (6:26 am)
For the record, the performance boost is minimal if you've got a multitexturing card with a decent amount of fillrate. Static vertex lighting is really for old cards that couldn't multitexture.
#3
Per-pixel lighting is the most realistic lighting solution. It's still pretty "new" though cards since the original GeForce have been able to do it fine. Vertex lighting does indeed calculate light values at each vertex and interpolate across the entire polygon (aka gouraud shading), but with per-pixel you're doing lighting calculations for each pixel.
That's the rage now in 3d gaming; Hi res normal bump maps, which allow you to cram an amazing amount of visual detail into a fairly low poly character.
09/24/2003 (5:16 pm)
After having dug around in the interior rendering part of the code recently, I know at least how that part of Torque works. As far as I can tell the vertex lighting option just tells Torque not to assume it can multitexture and instead skips rendering the lightmaps. (Though it will do fog via multi-pass.) And yeah, it doesn't bother handling environment maps for interiors. I haven't dug into the .dts rendering code much but I presume it's similiar.Per-pixel lighting is the most realistic lighting solution. It's still pretty "new" though cards since the original GeForce have been able to do it fine. Vertex lighting does indeed calculate light values at each vertex and interpolate across the entire polygon (aka gouraud shading), but with per-pixel you're doing lighting calculations for each pixel.
That's the rage now in 3d gaming; Hi res normal bump maps, which allow you to cram an amazing amount of visual detail into a fairly low poly character.
Associate Kyle Carter