HDR Lighting  7/7/2006 - 04 PM CET

Just a quick update on the progress of our maps. You've been hearing about HDR lighting and texture tone mapping for some time now. Ever wonder what it was exactly and how it will benefit the game? Read below:

Coroner is currently finalizing the lighting in all seven release maps using TCE's new strongly improved q3map2 tool.

All maps will feature TCE's high dynamic range (HDR) lightmap technology and dynamic eye adaptation. We are very proud that TCE will be probably the first game that uses a completely new, psychophysically motivated way to compute lightmaps and lighting, so far only known from professional rendering programs and scientific publications.

The advantage for the player is a much higher degree of realism, which basically has the potential to turn map shots into real life pictures.

Finally, with this step, TCE is able to overcome all downsides of traditional light computation in games. Realistic light falloff and scattering of sun and sky light into rooms are now possible like never seen before.

To achieve this effect, TCE's HDR technology renders all map lighting with physically correct settings of light source luminances and transforms the physical light information to how the human eye would perceive it.

This static tonemapping of the lightmaps based on the global setting of the map (night, day) is then combined with TCE's dynamic eye adaptation which simulates the adaptation of the human eye to brighter and darker parts of the scene.

While dynamic eye is client side configurable and can be switched if unwanted (or if FPS is impacted on old hardware), all TCE gamers will be able to benefit from TCE's new lightmap rendering technology.

The below shots show some WIP with low lightmap resolution (will be 4 times higher in final game):

Diane
G6/TeamTerminator Development Team