Beautiful spaceship interior

[klauss]

@ryder:

...switchable lightmaps

[Ryder P. Moses]

Which have no disadvantage as compared to actual lighting, which was more or less what you were pushing I'd gathered.

[klauss]

They do: much higher memory consumption.
You'd need at least 3 or 4 lightmaps... all of relatively high resolution (to achieve the precise detail that shows on the renders - for a lightmap).

[Howard Day]

That is of course true. However, we can dim and brighten the glow map according to color channel. That left us turn all the green lights off, all the red one, etc. Alternatively, we can filter the glow map in it's entirety according to another animated noise map. This will allow us to flicker the lights quite convincingly, with no real memory or processor hit. We are trying to limit the number of dynamic light we use in out scenes. At most, they're limited to the outside environment, not the cockpit.

[chuck_starchaser]

On the other hand, a glow map doesn't usually need to have as much resolution as the diffuse, specular and normal textures. Four glow maps at half the rez might work pretty well.
Klauss, what you say about the advantages of dynamic ligths is true, but if you use dynamic shadows, I presume one light is enough trouble already. Switching between light maps, or better yet, having, say, 4 light maps with radiosity bakings for 4 light sources and adding them on the fly in the CPU as per the combination of light sources being on or off, before even sending it to the video card, would afford a lot of realism on the cheap.

[klauss]

Of course... there are lots of ways of implementing the idea. I just wanted to present the idea itself. If I were to choose an implementation, I'd choose, basically, a mixture of both: some, important lights would be dynamic... radiosity and some other stuff would be lightmaps. The target: mantain high-quality but low-resolution lightmaps (by lightmapping only low-frequency sources, like radiosity), while still retaining the high-quality lighting and shadowing given by dynamic lights. Of course... no more than 1 (or perhaps 2) dynamic lights in the cockpit.

That's the data side... I would actually set up the engine to be able to handle anything. I like engines that can handle anything... just in case you want to target a computer capable of... say... 12 dynamic lights, all with stencil shadows (might be true in the future, you know).

[chuck_starchaser]

True, good thinking. One of these days, GPU's should start doing occlusion culling at the geometry stage, as well as shadows by default, from all light sources... I mean, if they are looking for ideas for something new to do..