pureLIGHT sneak peak

#1 Thank you. This looks pretty impressive.

Looking forward to the announcement :)

#2 Looks very good David. Perhaps since you've opened this yourself, you'll be willing to answer a few questions about pureLIGHT, specifically in relation to how it'll work with existing T3D tech.

1) Is this going to work with the advanced lighting, or is pureLIGHT targeting the basic lighting within T3D?

2) Has any consideration been done for dynamic lights?

3) What's the performance hit look like?

#3 MMMMMM PureLight.

#4 Very nice, thanks for sharing!

#5 Very impressive. I'm very interested in this.

#6 Tim, we are looking to have it working with advanced lighting.

We have worked with the hybrid approach in the past. We find that pureLIGHT enviroments combined with dynamic lights offers the best of both worlds in terms of visuals.

As for the performance hit, the less dynamic lights the better the framerate so a well placed combination of both is the optimum choice. Without the dynamic lights the cost of pureLIGHT, as per the netbook blog that Brett posted, is very small. Just the memory footprint really and that's determined by the choices you make when generating the lightmaps.

#7 Definitely looks good (rendered in Unreal Tournament III),
after reading their site I could see no mention of radiosity

Is bounced light aka radiosity catered for in pure light ?

#8 David, this looks fantastic. I am very excited to have a baked-in lighting solution for Torque. If you have any issues integrating it into advanced lighting, let me know.

#9 But, baked light maps are generated at runtime isnt it ? so its not useful for outdoor scenes with moving sun ? (i got no clue, thats why im asking hehe).

Also, i havent really read much of the blogs, this is a addon that cost extra money right ? (if so, what kind of price range are we talking) or does it just come with pro license ?.

BTW, downloaded the unreal map, looked really awesome (in Unreal III of course :P).

Im looking forward to see what this does for the engine :)

#10 Hewster - Yes, pureLIGHT uses radiosity.

Bo Bjering - Right now pureLIGHT runs as an external application that will be compatible with T3D. As for licensing we haven't announced that yet, but we are looking at options for indie and pro licensing.

#11 @David,
that is pure beauty!

#12 @David
Very impressive, indeed.

#13 @Bo: obviously lightmaps and moving suns don't go together, since lightmaps are static. This is the reason Stalker had day-night cycles without a moving sun, because the sun shadows were real-time only in the highest video settings, being just lightmaps in the medium and low settings.

@David:

Does pureLIGHT allow saving only the indirect light? This way the sun shadows can remain real-time and sharp while having nice light bounces baked in the levels (which can look well without using very large lightmaps). Many games use this trick: Uncharted, Tomb Raider Underworld and Metal Gear Solid 4 to name a few.

#14 Playlore - Thats an interesting question; by saving the direct light, we get a consistency with the lighting and can take advantage of soft area shadows among other effects. You could probally achieve the effect you are describing out of the box using an extremely large direct-light-filter-radius, though we could potentially do some tests and work this in as an actual feature.

#15 I think that indirect lighting from dynamic sources is a feature all on it's own. I'd basically turn the shadow map for dynamic lights into a g-buffer. The direct lighting code would use the depth, and then you could apply indirect lighting as a post-process using the g-buffer for the light. Instead of storing a normal, this would probably be a good case for Valve's radiosity bump mapping.

#16 Pat - Long story short, thats not how things are currently setup, though it is an interesting approach, and we would be open to considering research in that direction in the future.

#17 Another question: do you guys plan adding GPU acceleration support (like CUDA, OpenCL, etc) for the baking process? That would be a killer feature, specially for indies without access to farm-setups.

#18 Playlore - That is something we can definitely look into if there is a demand. Right now we support multi-core rendering, so you can speed things up quite a bit by using an Intel or AMD quad core.

#19 David: It's still kind of a half-baked idea I've been kicking around since I read the paper on Imperfect Shadow Maps (which is an awesome read). I'd like to somehow bring that into real-time for a limited number of lights. It seems like you should just be able to render some kind of reverse-shadow shadow map, so that you would have the data you need to do direct shadows, as well as construct rays to use for a single bounce of indirect.

Another option would be kind of like reflection probes and just have either programatically-placed, or artist-placed entities that update paraboloid maps at some frequency which can then be used for indirect lighting (Tom may have already written code that could be used for this). I like this idea for 100% dynamic scenes. I think you can chose to dedicate a certain percentage of frame-time to updating these maps.

I have a lot on my plate right now, but this is a problem I am looking forward to solving.

#20 Pat - We are also looking forward to your input. You definitely have a lot of great ideas.

I also wanted to post this video we made showing a brief overview of how pureLIGHT works - www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaMVg4vJDFA&feature=channel_page