Pre-computed Light Carving into Meshes

Speakers: Stephan Etienne

Track: Programming

Format: Lecture

Experience Level: Intermediate

Description: Even though memory available to games has increased in recent years, memory usage still is a concern for all games being made. Most titles use some form of pre-computed lighting that is stored into textures somewhere in their pipeline. This talk presents a novel technique that uses vertices instead of lightmaps to store pre-computed lighting and shadows. The technique is divided into three steps: 1 – Tesselation: The input mesh is tesselated to some user specified resolution. 2 – Lighting: A lighting solution such as radiosity is used to compute lighting information at each vertex. 3 – Simplification: The gist of the technique involves removing the maximum number of vertices and creating edges so as to retain as much information as possible and generate shadows that are of even higher quality than if lightmaps were used.

Idea Takeaway: This presentation will benefit rendering engine programers the most. Understanding of basic algebra is expected.

Intended Audience: Attendees will leave a clear understanding on how this technique can be implemented and how it will reduce memory usage, yet improve visual quality of their games.