dynamic shadows in new trailer

[BigJack]

anyone else notice in the antlion section of the trailers, with the vortigaunt, when gordon switches his torch on there are some super natty dynamic shadows present?? i've included a picture in which its most clearly visible just for those lazy mothers...



They seemed to slip that by us without a mention....sneaky valve

 

[Przemek]

Yes, I've noticed and it looks great
Lightmaps combined with fully dynamic shadows - I wonder how it affects performance

 

[DEATH eVADER]

Yeah, its nice to know that Valve gone on to all fronts:

Console Releases
Fandangled New Lighting and Shadow System
Cinematic Physics

What I would like to know is how they managed to make vast outdoor areas without level transisitons. Have they brought back 2D image rendering to cheapen overall graphics resources?

 

[tehsolace]

that was the first thing i noticed... the new lighting looks amazing. i just hope its not over-done... some of the characters faces seem to look over-exposed and almost purely white in the videos :/

 

[Sanius]

Yeah, that's nice, but no cigar. If you guys watch more closely, they still retain the old shadows on models (you know, the ones that never change angle or size according where the lightsource is located) and they still have a lot of static maps laying around. Also, it seems that the dynamic lighting/shadowing only works if the lightsource is enabled to work with it. Modders and map developers (I assume) could do this and have maps complete with dynamic shadowing and lighting, but it seems like we won't see it in many places without using a flashlight in Episode 2, which I hope DOESN'T happen. By the time it's released you will have Gears of War, Lost Planet, Halo 3, UT2k7, and hell..Many already released games (GR:AW, Doom 3) that have dynamic lighting and shadowing.

I don't know why it's not completly unified in Episode 2. Are they having problems with it? Because apparently UE3 and the Doom 3 engine only need five passes to complete shadow calculations, but the source engine requires eight (much more preformance intensive for completly unified lighting.) This goes double for soft shadowing.

Here's to hoping they can do it..

 

[RomeoJGuy]

I believe it only works with spot base lights versus point lights, because it looks like it uses a shadow map technique.

 

[Qhartb]

I don't know why it's not completly unified in Episode 2. Are they having problems with it? Because apparently UE3 and the Doom 3 engine only need five passes to complete shadow calculations, but the source engine requires eight (much more preformance intensive for completly unified lighting.) This goes double for soft shadowing.

Here's to hoping they can do it..

UE3 doesn't have a completely unified dynamic lighting and shadowing model. As far as I know, Doom 3 is the only major engine to do that. That doesn't mean that UE3 and Source are subpar. "Unified lighting" is mostly an iD buzzword. I really don't think Valve or Epic (or most others) think it's the way to go. It makes more sense for lighting effects to use the model that works best for that effect.

I think Source is coming along very nicely, myself.

 

[Atomic_Piggy]

Qft

 

[Sanius]

UE3 doesn't have a completely unified dynamic lighting and shadowing model. As far as I know, Doom 3 is the only major engine to do that. That doesn't mean that UE3 and Source are subpar. "Unified lighting" is mostly an iD buzzword. I really don't think Valve or Epic (or most others) think it's the way to go. It makes more sense for lighting effects to use the model that works best for that effect.

I think Source is coming along very nicely, myself.

Actully, it does. According to their website, they do not have one, but FOUR different shadowing techniques available on their engine. Like so:

# Advanced Dynamic Shadowing. Unreal Engine 3 provides full support for four shadowing techniques:

* Dynamic stencil buffered shadow volumes supporting fully dynamic, moving light sources casting accurate shadows on all objects in the scene.
* Dynamic characters casting dynamic soft, fuzzy shadows on the scene using 16X-oversampled shadow buffers.
* Ultra high quality and high performance pre-computed shadow masks allow offline processing of static light interactions, while retaining fully dynamic specular lighting and reflections.
* Directional Light Mapping enables the static shadowing and diffuse normal-mapped lighting of an unlimited number of lights to be precomputed and stored into a single set of texture maps, enabling very large light counts in high-performance scenes.

 

[Epsi]

If they have 4 different methods, that ain't very unified. Anyways, Source pretty much does all those points.

It boils down to, we have capability for dynamic lights and shadows that look really great, but for the best quality with lots of static lights, you really should pre-compute it.

 

[subtlesnake]

Yeah, that's nice, but no cigar. If you guys watch more closely, they still retain the old shadows on models (you know, the ones that never change angle or size according where the lightsource is located) and they still have a lot of static maps laying around.

Valve have said the new shadowing system is experimental. That's why it's not being used in the rest of the game. However, I wouldn't expect Valve to move away from their static lighting system - it's a huge performance win, and lightmaps still look pretty good.

Also, it seems that the dynamic lighting/shadowing only works if the
I don't know why it's not completly unified in Episode 2. Are they having problems with it? Because apparently UE3 and the Doom 3 engine only need five passes to complete shadow calculations, but the source engine requires eight (much more preformance intensive for completly unified lighting.) This goes double for soft shadowing.

As long as they still use lightmaps then the lighting system will never be unified. Unified = the same lighting technique on everything. So UE3 does not have a unified lighting system, even though the various lighting techniques communicate with each other through one lighting shader.

Also, shadow maps are always going to be soft. They're naturally aliased, so for them to look any good at all you need some form of filtering (which has the side effect of softening them).

I believe it only works with spot base lights versus point lights, because it looks like it uses a shadow map technique.

I hope not. You can still do shadow mapping with point lights, it just requires the use of a cube map lookup, so is more expensive.

 

[Sanius]

If they have 4 different methods, that ain't very unified. Anyways, Source pretty much does all those points.

It boils down to, we have capability for dynamic lights and shadows that look really great, but for the best quality with lots of static lights, you really should pre-compute it.

I'm pretty sure they're providing support for four different seperate techniques that you can apply to your game. Not just one technique with different features. UE3 is built from next-gen systems and DX10 aswell. They're sure as hell going to work with unified lighting.

 

[BigJack]

halflife2 and its episodes are still the best looking game i've ever played, bar none, regardless of the technological shortcomings it may have.

i just thought it was interesting because the flashlight was the only thing which to me stood out as not really looking very realistic. Obviously now they have changed it and it looks great.

 

[Epsi]

Unified lighting is a bizarre iD software buzzword to make it sound like their engine is better.

It's like saying that a swiss army knife is worse than a kitchen knife because the kitchen knife has "unified cutting". Frankly, I'd rather have the swiss army so I can use the big knife, the small knife and pair of scissors, each used when they are most appropriate.

The fact is, that right now it makes the most sense to use multiple lighting techniques in a single scene to acheive the best possible visual quality, which is what UE3 and Source are doing. The "unifed" lighting in Doom 3 just means you're stuck with one method of lighting for everything which can look awfully fake if your art direction doesn't suit it.

 

[Sanius]

I understand you, Epsi.

I'm sure we will see Valve adding raytracing to the Source engine when the tech can work with it. Then we can get those pretty shadows.

 

[Cypher19]

Unified lighting is a bizarre iD software buzzword to make it sound like their engine is better.

It's like saying that a swiss army knife is worse than a kitchen knife because the kitchen knife has "unified cutting". Frankly, I'd rather have the swiss army so I can use the big knife, the small knife and pair of scissors, each used when they are most appropriate.

The fact is, that right now it makes the most sense to use multiple lighting techniques in a single scene to acheive the best possible visual quality, which is what UE3 and Source are doing. The "unifed" lighting in Doom 3 just means you're stuck with one method of lighting for everything which can look awfully fake if your art direction doesn't suit it.

Actually, it has quite a nice result because the world looks and is lit up exactly the same way as the characters. The lighting in Source vs. Doom3 is like comparing how consistent backgrounds and characters look in, say, your average saturday morning cartoons with watercolour backgrounds and cel characters and The Simpsons with the backgrounds looking exactly the same as the characters. As a result, you can have the world behave like a character (i.e. deform it: suddenly have some pieces of the wall fly around or get knocked, monster bending doors trying to get in, etc.) and you can't tell the difference. In Source, most of the time you can tell just by how the object is lit/shadowed if it is a dynamic or static object creating a fairly clear seperation between character and world that is, imo, as strong as the watercolor/cel scenarion of a lot of animation.

Imo, I actually think that with the shadow mapped spotlights they've added for Episode 2, the lighting starts to look fairly bizarre. Before, it looked quite acceptable to have only ONE kind of shadowing for dynamic characters (the directional shadow maps) and only ONE kind of shadowing for the environment (lightmaps). Now, it looks a bit weird to have things shadow at certain times and not at others, or things that were not producing shadows suddenly do, and some lighting doesn't produce proper shadows while others do, etc.

I hope not. You can still do shadow mapping with point lights, it just requires the use of a cube map lookup, so is more expensive.

Theoretically, it shouldn't be TOO difficult to extend the shadow mapping to point lights assuming the API for modding is robust enough on the graphics side (which I am not at all familiar with). It should be possible to make a special light that is basically 6 spotlights, and have each one light up a 90d FOV frustum/pyramid along each axis from the center of the light. However, I'm guessing that there'll be too much overhead going on with the spotlights to be able to use 6 for a single light and achieve a reasonable framerate.

I'm sure we will see Valve adding raytracing to the Source engine when the tech can work with it. Then we can get those pretty shadows

...well, first off, raytracing in realtime in practice is probably 3-4 years away, minimum. Secondly, why on earth would they use it for shadows? Shadow maps can give extremely high quality shadows, with quality comparable to raytracing. Thirdly, why develop it with the intention for just shadows? Realtime raytracing on games will be first seen for reflective and refractive surfaces, and for a very long time, probably exclusively for that.

 

[Przemek]

The problem with Doom 3's unified lighting is that today's hardware cannot calculate light bouncing in real time.

In complete darkness, go to your room and turn on a lamp in a corner. You will see many shadows, but none of them have ultra-sharp edges and aren't pitch-black. That's because light 'bounces' off surfaces. Now in Doom 3, all shadows will be totally black... You'd have to use multiple lights to create realistic shadows, but that's a huge performance hit and doesn't really make sense

In HL2-style lighting, 90% light is calculated during compile and just look how long it takes

 

[MjM]

I think as usual valve is making all the right decisions with regard to their technology, while perhaps not the most unified does in fact have the best aesthetic effect of all the current game engines ... imo Doom3 does not look so good ... very bland and unnatural.

 

[nutcrackr]

Doom 3 lighting is vomit inducing imho. I actually liked Doom 3 and the graphics are far from bad but I think the whole real time unified stencil shadows with no radiosity and a bad framerate doesn't equal good. Carmack jumped too early and although doom 3 fits with the engine he should have waited until some kind of radiosity could be used in environments with more than 5 polygons. Hell even the dark bits in HL2:Ep1 proved that you don't need the fancy lighting to do good stuff.

 

[PvtRyan]

Cypher, seen that Ambient Light Mapping (or something like that) that Crysis does? How exactly does that work, how do they fake the light bouncing around in real time? It looks very good from what I've seen though and probably the ultimate replacement of ye olde lightmaps.

 

[Cypher19]

Cypher, seen that Ambient Light Mapping (or something like that) that Crysis does? How exactly does that work, how do they fake the light bouncing around in real time? It looks very good from what I've seen though and probably the ultimate replacement of ye olde lightmaps.

I have zero ****ing clue, actually. For most effects in games I'm apathetic about overselling the amount of work involved (e.g. the lighting of Alyx in HL2Ep1) but I was blown away by that effect when I saw the Crysis demo.