Game Lighting System Architecture

Question

Hi,

I wonder if anyone has ever designed a lighting system for a game engine? or used lighting system in any engine?

If the scene can have many lights (20 or more), how do you design the lighting system? Do you pick the 4 nearest light? How does your design affect the shader?

Oh yeah, I'm talking about dynamic lights not the pre-baked lighting and assume the engine is shader based, not the fixed function.

Thanks!

-tep

Answer 1

What you are talking about is Deferred Shading or Light Pre-Pass render design by this guy. These renderers can have thousands of lights at a time with no problem.

It mostly involves rendering your lighting and geometric info to textures, and then using shaders to process the textures into a final image.