This blog is based on a recent article written by Geomerics for the publication Making Games. For more information on any of the techniques outlined in this blog, read more here.
Lighting is the most fundamental element of any game environment. Applied correctly, it brings three dimensional geometry to life, amplifies the emotions of a scene and draws the eyes to important areas of focus. Global illumination, the interplay of lights and materials, plays a significant role in creating this balanced scene lighting.
Image 1: The left image shows direct lighting only; the right image shows the difference the addition of global illumination makes.
It is vital that games industry members understand the variety of techniques available and adopt the one that is most suitable for their platform, environment, gameplay and performance budget. In this article we’ll explore a variety of options available, weigh up their advantages and limitations and conclude with recommendations for different scenarios.
1. Baked Lighting
Baked lighting is an extremely common technique used for both direct and indirect lighting information as well as other effects such as ambient occlusion. It fully pre-calculates lighting information for static scenes and stores the output in static data structures which are then consumed by fragment shaders. The most commonly used data structures are textures, spherical harmonics probes and cubemaps.
Baking can produce high quality results and is among the most affordable runtime techniques, enabling performance efficient indirect lighting even on mobile devices. However, everything is static at runtime both in the game and in the editor. Light sources, materials and meshes can’t be changed at runtime. The only option for dynamic content is to swap out entire data sets, which is very costly with respect to memory consumption as well as creating and managing this additional content. This either limits dynamic gameplay options or requires sacrifices with respect to visual quality or dynamic content.
In addition, baked lighting has the lengthiest workflow of all the global illumination solutions listed in this article. In order to see the effect of any changes made to a scene, no matter how small, artists need to run a full lighting bake. Given that in order to get a scene to AAA quality an artist will need to iterate on each individual light many times, baking can have a significant impact on a studio’s bottom line as well as the quality of the final result.
2. Light Propagation Volumes
The technique for light propagation volumes was proposed by Kaplanayan and Dachsbacher in 2010 as an alternative to traditional baked lighting and first implemented in CryEngine 3. The core idea behind this technique is to inject virtual point lights into a three-dimensional data structure, aggregate the injected lights for each cell, and finally iteratively propagate them to neighbouring cells.
Light propagation volumes allow lights, materials and objects to be fully dynamic at runtime. They work well with complex geometry and are relatively stable and flicker-free. At basic quality levels the technique can even scale down to mobile platforms. In addition, light propagation volumes can theoretically support multiple bounces, glossy reflections and participating media; however, in reality these extensions are considered too expensive for practical applications and the computational resources are rather used to improve the base lighting quality.
Image 2: Light propagation volumes can support participating media and glossy reflections
The technique has a number of issues that limit its application, the biggest being their low spatial resolution due to memory constraints even when employing cascades. Due to this, light and shadow leaking are a common occurrence and the lighting result is fairly ambient with low contrast. Combined with the fact that runtime performance scales with the number of light sources, light propagation volumes are mostly used for outdoor scenes with only a single directional light source.
3. Voxel Cone Tracing
While light propagation volumes calculate lighting for each cell and apply the indirect lighting result by a simple lookup into a volume texture, voxel cone tracing only calculates lighting in areas where there is actual geometry while performing a much more involved aggregation of the indirect lighting in the fragment shader.
Image 3: Comparison of light propagation volumes and voxel cone tracing
Voxel cone tracing provides an elegant light propagation and aggregation model for both indirect lighting as well as specular reflections. It is able to handle complex geometry including transparency and participating media while delivering smooth lighting results at a higher quality than light propagation volumes. However, it is very expensive to achieve these quality levels and the technique cannot scale to more budgeted platforms. Voxel cone tracing still suffers from significant light leaking issues even at medium quality levels and the directional information required to significantly improve quality would further increase memory cost.
4. Pre-computed Visibility
Determining the visibility between surfaces is the most expensive part of calculating global illumination. By pre-computing the surface-to-surface visibility information, compressing this data and only at runtime combining it with material and direct lighting information, it is possible to provide high quality dynamic global illumination effects across all gaming platforms – even on mobile.
Image 4: This graph visualizes how pre-computed visibility global illumination works
Pre-computed visibility global illumination is similar to baked lighting in respect to storing its data output in the same three data structures: lightmaps, spherical harmonics probes and cubemaps. The difference is that precomputed visibility makes dynamic global illumination effects such as time of day, changing materials and player controlled lighting efficient enough to occur at runtime no matter the platform. Additionally, once the initial pre-computation is done, all light sources and materials can be changed in real-time in the editor and the resultant effect on the global illumination can be seen instantly. This allows artists to iterate over the lighting of a scene much more efficiently than with baked lighting, resulting in huge time-savings and often better visual quality.
The limitations to this technique include the requirement for enough geometry in the scene to be static to enable a precompute – certain environments, for example procedurally generated, completely dynamic or user-generated content, are not suitable. And while it is still much faster than traditional baked lighting, the pre-computation step may well be an adjustment for artists who are used to other techniques.
ARM’s Enlighten is the industry standard for pre-computed visibility global illumination. It is easily accessible as the default global illumination solution inside Unity 5 and licensable for Unreal Engine 3 and 4 as well as for internal engines.
Conclusion
The aforementioned techniques for computing global illumination can broadly be sorted into two categories:
Surface Techniques | Volume Techniques |
Baked lighting | Light propagation volumes |
Pre-computed visibility | Voxel cone tracing |
Surface techniques compute indirect lighting based on the transfer of light between two-dimensional surfaces, whereas volume techniques rely on an underlying three-dimensional data structure. Surface techniques require different degrees of pre-computation and offer limited support for dynamic objects. However, they are affordable at runtime, don’t suffer from light or shadow leaking and are the only techniques that have proven scalability down to mobile platforms.
So if you are developing a game right now, which global illumination technique is best for you? The answer to this question depends strongly on the game environment and target platforms you are considering.
Provided that your scenes are static, baked lighting is a great option for affordable lighting that scales to mobile.
If your game consists largely of outdoor areas and can be lit by a single directional light source, light propagation volumes is a techniques that you might want to consider.
For those titles which are intended only for high-end PCs, voxel cone tracing is an option. Yet, in many cases it is too expensive, especially with respect to memory consumption.
In all other cases, pre-computed visibility is a scalable, flexible and proven technique. If your game consists of enough static meshes to support the necessary surface-to-surface pre-computation, it offers the benefits of dynamism and rapid artist workflow along with the scalability enabled by baked lighting.
