Pre Computed Global Illumination in Games
Traditionally lightmaps have been used as part of a global illumination solution to encode irradiance, which is good for capturing diffuse detail on flat surfaces. For bumpy (normal mapped) surfaces and non-diffuse materials it is necessary to compute and store a representation of the incoming radiance. At run-time this can be dynamically convolved with a surface description to achieve the level of detail expected of our games. I will talk about choices of representations for radiance, including the HL2 basis, spherical harmonics and radial basis functions; including how to fit a lighting environment to the representation and how to use the calculated values to evaluate the lighting at run-time.
Delivered by Ash Henstock, Software Development Engineer
Ash completed a BSc in Computer Science at the University of Nottingham in 2005 and shortly after began working in the shared technology group at Rare, working closely with all of Rare’s game teams. Ash has been focussed on lighting solutions, particularly lightmapping, to capture realistic global illumination and material response; this involves research in to lighting techniques as well as tools integration.
