What Lighting Technique is used here?

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7 comments, last by turch 11 years, 7 months ago
Can anyone please tell me what technique they might be using for this game:

http://oyster.ignimgs.com/ve3d/images/04/16/41627_TheHunter-InGame-11.jpg

It looks really good, but too good for just ambient + sun light. Does anyone think AO?

Thanks
Jeff.
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It looks really good, but too good for just ambient + sun light. Does anyone think AO?
I can't see more light sources than just the sun, and I can't see any AO.

The shadows are pretty good, the detailed textures and normal-maps help, there seems to be subtle specular, and it looks like it's rendered in HDR with a very bright sun light source.
Where do you see normal-maps?
How can you tell its HDR? Could the textures just be lighter?

Thanks
Jeff
The tree trunks seem to be normal-mapped, and the deer seems to be as well.
On the left, there's a thick white tree just left of a thick brown tree. Look at the vertical line where it transitions from light into shadow. On a smooth shape, this "termination line" would also be smooth, but on the tree it's very irregular, indicating a bumpy surface. It's either high-poly or normal mapped.

It could just be a bright light in a non-HDR renderer (e.g. sun brightness of 2.0), but as there's no visible saturation anywhere, it's either been carefully tweaked, or is HDR.
If you look at the thin white tree in the foreground on the left, the thin shadowed trunk appears quite different to the lit trunk next to it (which seems to share the same texture). Also, the lit trunk is almost saturated, so if that was the original texture, then when darkened (to produce the shadowed trunk) it would not have as much detail as the shadowed trunk actually has - so that texture has probably been lightened above it's original painted values in the lit areas.

The tree trunks seem to be normal-mapped, and the deer seems to be as well.
On the left, there's a thick white tree just left of a thick brown tree. Look at the vertical line where it transitions from light into shadow. On a smooth shape, this "termination line" would also be smooth, but on the tree it's very irregular, indicating a bumpy surface. It's either high-poly or normal mapped.

It could just be a bright light in a non-HDR renderer (e.g. sun brightness of 2.0), but as there's no visible saturation anywhere, it's either been carefully tweaked, or is HDR.
If you look at the thin white tree in the foreground on the left, the thin shadowed trunk appears quite different to the lit trunk next to it (which seems to share the same texture). Also, the lit trunk is almost saturated, so if that was the original texture, then when darkened (to produce the shadowed trunk) it would not have as much detail as the shadowed trunk actually has - so that texture has probably been lightened above it's original painted values in the lit areas.


Really nice explanation. What do you think about the indirect illumination? Is it just constant term or sh lighting, or what? I don't really see any variations in the illumination in shadows.
Hodgman,

Thanks for the explanation. I guess HDR + bump = really nice scenes :)

Thanks
Jeff.

I guess HDR + bump = really nice scenes smile.png

An awful lot of the quality in any rendered scene is in the textures. Really high quality diffuse+bump texture can make up for the lack of many complicated/expensive effects.

Tristam MacDonald. Ex-BigTech Software Engineer. Future farmer. [https://trist.am]

yes, the foreground shadowed trunk on the right shows that there is variation in the lighting even in the shadow. this appears to be some kind of pure ambient + slight lambertian.
both ambiant+lambert are tweaked to look like the average sky color (blueish). this can be seen particularly on the rocks, in the shadows they are blue.
if this is automatic, this could be 2 bands SH lighting, but in my opinion it is just manual.
I thought this looked familiar... :)

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