Applying Light Mapping Techniques to Vis-Sim Databases
Abstract
The Gaming and Visualization and Simulation industries have recently focused on shaders and stencil shadow volumes to add realistic lighting and hard shadow effects to the scene. While producing great looking results, these techniques are still computationally expensive at run time, especially when simulating many light sources. For most databases and simulations the lighting and shadow effects for the terrain geometry are diffuse, static in nature, and not greatly affected by dynamic entities. Using this assumption, the diffuse lighting, shading, and shadowing effects of all static light sources can be pre-rendered into the database. This technique is generally known as "Light Mapping," and it has been in wide use in the gaming industry since ID Software's Quake 1. This paper will present the tool set and methods that Real-Time Technologies developed to apply this technique to OpenFlight models.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jul 02, 2005
- Accession Number
- ADA443840
Entities
People
- Michael M. Morrison