cube lights

Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/cube lights

Rob(Posted 2004) [#1]
anyone used cube maps to do cube lighting as like what mustang did in 3dmark?

or shall I have a crack at it in blitz?


poopla(Posted 2004) [#2]
Crack away, any screens of this? I don't recall seeing it in the 3dMark demo I got back in the day.


sswift(Posted 2004) [#3]
I haven't, but what precisely do you mean by cube lighting?

I've had an idea for a while that one could light characters with very realistic, almost radiosity like lighting as they move through an environment, simply by rendering a tiny cube map from their location and applying that with x2 multiply over the texture. This also would allow one to have dynamic lights affect the character, which is a neccessity because the lights themselves will not appear in a cube map rendering, nor does a cube map support HDIR... HRDI... HDRI.... Floating point lighting. So you use the dynamic lights to apply the heavy lighting and specular, and use the cube map to apply the more subtle radiosity style light.


AdrianT(Posted 2004) [#4]
I know Antony was harping on about cube map lights and had some cool cheap dynamic lighting type effects a while back that used a greyscale light chorona (whatever you call it) said he was using cube maps anyway, and got a kind of per pixel light effect that looked a lot better than the per vertex blitz lighting and was cheaper so long as you didn't scale the falloff and make it too big.


puki(Posted 2004) [#5]
It's about time the "Cummings" one released some new demos - I seem to remember him mentioning getting a new computer to do better stuff on it - Athlon64/9800PRO seems good enough to me.


Mustang(Posted 2004) [#6]
I wrote a REALLY big post here yesterday but when I pressed the "post" button I got tooo many user SQL error or something and after that Blitz site was unreachable... and I lost my post. Short version:

-I used cubelights in 3DMark03 wwII - there were not one single true light in there.
-Getting equivalent lighting with "true" lights would have required the use of 3-5 lights... too many!
-Cubelighting is fast, easy, and well supported (from GF1 onwards basically) and ONLY way IMO to make characters and other moving objects to blend in nicely if you are using pre-rendered (lightmapped) levels in your games.
-rendering cubemaps from the scene and using that is possible, but you really need to convolute the cubemap using for example free HDRShop... but raw cubemap might do also if you render it using very small size to get "blurring"

I asked cubemaps for Blitz because I wanted to use them for lighting, instead most examples used it for water reflections which is nice too, but not what I wanted. I still don't know if I can use cubemaps for lighting in Blitz.

More about the subject (and forget HDR and Spherical Harmonics, let's get cubemap lighting work first):

http://www.cbloom.com/3d/techdocs/cubemap_lighting.txt