Enlighten @ GDC 2008

I’ve been meaning to post for a while now, but any posts I would have made would probably have been inconsequential drivel (see all other posts). But not this time!

We at Geomerics have been working rather hard*, and we’ve produced a small teaser video of our work in preparation for GDC 2008. We have more than this teaser, but we’re saving that for the event itself. The video is a capture of our lead technical artist, Ivan Pedersen, demonstrating (at x4 speed) the capabilities of our technology. It’ll hopefully put to rest some of the rumours that it’s all just a fake. (Such rumours kill fairies.)

Find the high-definition version here!

Also, here are some details to answer some other questions that I get frequently asked:

  • It is dynamic: you can move lights and geometry, change the materials, et cetera, and the radiosity will change accordingly.
  • Dynamic shadows do affect the radiosity.
  • It can do larger levels/maps/geometry than shown here. We’re saving that for GDC.
  • It is more efficient when using a precompute step for static geometry. Dynamic geometry does not need this step.**
  • It uses two solutions for static and deformable geometry, just for efficiency’s sake. In theory you could mark everything as a deformable object…
  • It runs fast enough for use in computer games, or we’d all be out of a job. )
  • There is an SPU version for PS3. It is fully threadable for Windows and Xbox 360.

I confess I’m being deliberately vague about performance here, and you have my sincerest apologies. This isn’t because I’m a filthy liar, but with the extensive work going on here in the office at the moment, I’m not going to commit to any numbers. Also, that’s a job for the marketing types, so I’m not going to tread on anyone’s toes. If anyone does have any questions, however, you can email Geomerics directly from the website.

By the way, I love this website!

* Between the parties and the hookers.
** For the radiosity precomputation only, this took around 3-5 minutes.

One Response to “Enlighten @ GDC 2008”

  1. ACoupleOfQuestions Says:

    1) Do the dynamic objects sample lighting from a single point?

    2) According to the description on the website, Enlighten generates radiosity lightmaps each frame. How do you deal with aliasing? Does it generate mipmapped radiosity lightmaps or are the resolutions of the radiosity lightmaps so low that this is not an issue?

    Thanks.

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