BUILD | LIGHTING
Lighting the way
Middleware provider Geomerics is revealing a range of new technologies at GDC 2012. Will Freeman catches up with founder Chris Doran to find what the company has planned for the biggest week on the games development calendar
It’s a little while since we last spoke to Geomerics. What have you been up to? 2011 was a breakthrough year for us. It started with our first deal in Japan, ended with our first deal in Korea, and saw the launch of the first titles to make use of Enlighten. The reception to Battlefield 3 has been
Enlighten in action (main image), taken from Battlefield 3, developed by EA DICE. Above: Chris Doran, Geomerics founder
awesome. Many of the reviewers were singling out the lighting for particular praise, which was great after all of the work we put in with the team at DICE. It’s gone on to sell over 12 million copies and I think it has reset expectations of what can be achieved on the current generation of consoles.
What can you reveal about the new tech Geomerics is showing off at GDC? It falls into three broad areas. We are increasing the number of supported platforms with the release of a mobile version of Enlighten, we are showing off new runtime technology on CUDA aimed at next generation hardware, and most excitingly, we are demonstrating a complete lighting pipeline for all types of lighting solution, from baking through to fully dynamic lighting.
You mention mobile; How do you see high- end technologies like Enlighten fitting into such a rapidly evolving space? We started working on an iOS version of Enlighten last summer and were pleasantly surprised with the performance we saw. By
60 |MARCH 2012
porting Enlighten to the ARM cores on an A5 we were able to get close to console performance; definitely in the same ballpark, and close enough to make dynamic radiosity practical on today’s tablets. We’d like to see the GPUs improve a little so that dynamic direct lighting can get up to console standard, but you can see this happening very soon based on the roadmaps these guys are on. We now have Enlighten running well on both iOS and Android on a range of hardware, including Tegra and Mali.
I think some people are underestimating
the potential of the PlayStation Vita as well. It is a seriously powerful piece of kit.
Chris Doran, Geomerics I have to say I think some people are
underestimating the potential of the PlayStation Vita as well. It is a seriously powerful piece of kit. It may be based around mobile processors, but it will be capable of PS3 quality. Our message is that mobile is absolutely ready for triple-A quality games.
And how about your baking technology? Until now you have always talked about dynamic lighting. What motivated the move to a static technology? You know, I don’t think we fully understood what we had until we got to watch people using it in production. That is probably true of a lot of products early in their life. While we absolutely believe that the future of lighting is to be totally real-time, it became clear to us that the artists were just as excited about the real-time workflow as the in-game capabilities of dynamic lighting. As artists started playing with Enlighten
they were able to achieve incredibly high quality purely through their ability to iterate and experiment.
When each new lighting configuration can
be tested instantly, you can churn through ideas and refine them until you have just the look you are after. If you have to wait hours each time you
move a light, this option is simply not available. What we learnt was that, for game art in particular, the quality achieved by letting an artist iterate towards a look was always higher than could be achieved by the most advanced off-line renderers. Once we started to understand the power of
this way of working we started thinking about how Enlighten could be used in games that are not wholly dynamic at runtime.
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