Dynamic Light on HL2 , can be true ???
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The Dark Elf
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Raptor6 said:
What did I tell you guys, this is the reason some want it. Lazyness.
Sorry Raptor but if you think thats all thats involved in lighting any scene, be it game, map, film or studio. Then you've a long way to go.
Lighting is an art, not a fiddle with settings and consider it done.
The Dark Elf
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But it is a broken link.. there's nothing there......Adam said:
InSaNe TuBaíNa
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lol... i paid close attention twice.. it moves too fast XD
Crusader
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If anything you'll need to think harder about lighting scenes in Doom 3, because a) You require a sound knowledge of cinematic lighting as it is realtime, and b) if done incorrectly it will look like a dog's dinner of hard shadows...
booogerhead
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looks like we should just wait until raytracing becomes big, then we can have dynamic EVERYTHING! YAYYYYYY!
The Dark Elf
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meh I wrote a huge reply to this.. Then realised I could sum it up thus...Crusader said:
To remove hard edge shadows, you'll need to place around 40 lights just slightly apart from each other, at varying brightnesses to make the shadow a little smoother.
Considering Doom III will likely balk at just 40 of those lights, imagine trying to light a whole area that way. Talking 500/600 lights...
But you still have the unrealistic lighting.. And since you have no bounced light. You need to add bounce light manually, and then negative lights to offset the effect and control where the light isn't supposed to be (since they'd give a smoother effect, and you never use shadow casting lights as bounce and negative lights).. Course doing that means they would have to change if the other lights change, or the illusion would be lost.. So you'd have to somehow script your bounce and negative lights to match movement of other lights. Thats a LOT of lights that would have to move.
Your now nearing 1,000 or more lights in a single map... Just to mimic a realistic lighting effect which HL1 and HL2 could do with just one light.. hell use texture lighting and you could do it with NO actual lights in your scene.
and even with a thousand lights in your doom scene, it still wont be perfect, the sharp edges will still be visible and will become more noticable the further away the shadow casting object is to the lights.
So yeah. Nuff said
Neutrino
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Fenric said:meh I wrote a huge reply to this.. Then realised I could sum it up thus...
To remove hard edge shadows, you'll need to place around 40 lights just slightly apart from each other, at varying brightnesses to make the shadow a little smoother.
Considering Doom III will likely balk at just 40 of those lights, imagine trying to light a whole area that way. Talking 500/600 lights...
But you still have the unrealistic lighting.. And since you have no bounced light. You need to add bounce light manually, and then negative lights to offset the effect and control where the light isn't supposed to be (since they'd give a smoother effect, and you never use shadow casting lights as bounce and negative lights).. Course doing that means they would have to change if the other lights change, or the illusion would be lost.. So you'd have to somehow script your bounce and negative lights to match movement of other lights. Thats a LOT of lights that would have to move.
Your now nearing 1,000 or more lights in a single map... Just to mimic a realistic lighting effect which HL1 and HL2 could do with just one light.. hell use texture lighting and you could do it with NO actual lights in your scene.
and even with a thousand lights in your doom scene, it still wont be perfect, the sharp edges will still be visible and will become more noticable the further away the shadow casting object is to the lights.
So yeah. Nuff said
But couldn't you just use interpolation based on distance between two shadows, one sharp and one blurred to mimic dynamic soft shadowing rather than using multiple light sources? Isn't Unreal 3 using a technique like this?
The Dark Elf
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Yes you could. Or use shadow maps. Or use the slower but more accurate area shadows (which is a form of the above description only works better because its designed to do that)Neutrino said:
But Doom III can't because it wasn't designed that way (unless they've changed that, but the latest screenshots don't seem to be showing this.)
Unreal is way ahead and can because its coded that way, and cause its based on tomorrow's technology, so they can have it do complex things that couldn't be done now, but could be done by the time its released.. No doubt by then, what they are doing will end up being done mostly by the hardware in some video card anyway, so it'll be a painless trick which looks great.
HL2 has soft dynamic shadows because it didn't try to be clever, showing off, and instead used DX9 features that allowed for softer shadows that fade out the further away the object is from a surface. Not realistic but looks very nice.
Stalker, I think, went the same route, and IIRC have possibly set up its shadows to behave more like area shadows.
Basically.. if Doom III had used DX9, it could have done what it does, only be much less of a strain on the system as your video card would bare the brunt of it, rather than its current method which puts most of the load on the system itself.
I'd be fascinated to see someone make a DIII mod on Source. Just to see what can be done and if DIII's method really does have the advantage or not.
