Spherical harmonics lighting dymstyfied: the prelude
The prelude??? Haha. Anyway, I’m going to talk about spherical harmonics lighting in the next couple of posts. For the engine, I want to use spherical harmonics, along with a sky-model, to have arbitrary BRDF-based shading on surfaces and combine it with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_Space_Ambient_Occlusion http://www.vistax64.com/gaming/203581-crysis-warhead-ambient-occlusion.html for global illumnation. I’m don’t understand all the parts yet, so I can’t tell you about the efficiency. I do know that it will be enough for the look that I want, for now. Just throwing in some stuff which I think will look cool (fast BRDF with dynamic low frequency lighting and ambient occlusion for global illumination).
My goal is to explain each and every part of this in great detail. I will start with the mathematics behind spherical harmonics, where it comes from, etc. I will try my best to get into some details. I have some confidence that I can do this fairly well, because I took courses in differential equations and PDE’s, both of which supplies me with a lot of background. I don’t know how detailed I’m going to get, but I will try to break down all the terms, at least. I don’t know how well this will work out, because I don’t know whether one can explain it without prerequisites. We shall see.
June 6, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Spherical harmonics for lighting kick ass! Why do I get the sense that your engine will be a knock out compared to mine? Ahh, well we shall see. I’m pumped about RTS style space combat with ultra modular ship schematics with hierarchical dependencies. Should be fun as hell to target just the fuel lines and watch the engines lose power while the Bullet Physics powered soft body pipe flails around and blows the metaball fluid in to space.
Though seriously, impostor zombie hordes are gonna be about the most badass things ever. Put that in your bong and smoke it, game companies!
June 16, 2009 at 7:58 pm
LOL. I sense some sarcasm… Yeah, it’s about the acronyms… ehm, in this case, there isn’t any. Same difference.
I have not started coding yet.
I also don’t know whether I’m going to write the tutorials. SPHL the nitty-gritty details paper does a much better job. The only thing I can contribute is perhaps explain how Legendre polynomial are derived, which I have not seen explained–papers at least, it’s explained in math texts, you bet.