Mirror's edge lighting effects?
Author
I just got mirror's edge and I'm pretty impressed with the lighting effects. Right off the bat it looks like they are using SSAO with tone mapping/HDR. In general the shadows look pretty good, is this just basic shadow maps/shadow volumes or is there something more? I also notice that they have a very realistic looking way of doing area lights with soft shadows, and possibly diffuse lighting simulation. How do you think they are doing that?
I think they use SH lightmaps, at least this project is listed on Beast's (Turtle) developers website.
Mirror's edge uses almost all pre-computed lighting. As Viik mentioned, they used illuminate lab's GI solution to bake their light maps. Aside from that there's a bit of dynamic lighting on the dynamic geometry (which is pretty much just limited to the player on NPC's), as well as standard UE3 shadow maps for those guys.
Yeah, the environment is beautiful, but if you really look around you'll notice everything is static except for the player, NPCs, weapons, and doors (and some other small misc. objects).
It's easy baking the GI simulation into the textures/geometry using 3dsmax. The results are awesome and in many situations no real drawback to a completely dynamic lighting solution (which is way more expensive).
Quote:Original post by Ultramarine77
...and in many situations no real drawback to a completely dynamic lighting solution (which is way more expensive).
Except for the whole uhh..."not being dynamic" part. :-P
It can also be tricky getting the dynamic geometry to look like it fits in with the static geometry, and also getting the dynamic shadows to blend properly with the light maps (Mirror's Edge does a rather poor job at this).
This topic is closed to new replies.
Advertisement
Popular Topics
Advertisement
