#shadow baking

Happy Holidays from Shadow the Hedghog!. :)

Like a lot of other things in gaming graphics, I always felt that lighting would be computationally expensive but I never really understood how game programmers would deal with it. It wasn’t until I watched some video documentary trailer type thing for Mass Effect 2 where the developers explicitly stated that they painted on the lights in many of the environments. This is pretty much what shadow baking is.

The shadow mapping, on the other hand, was very limited in Mass Effect 2. There were very little dynamic entities in the game, and as such would be easy to cast shadows from these characters. Literally the only things that moved was the player and the NPCs. There were ships flying around and holograms and what not but those never casted shadows at all. It’s very interesting to see how developers tackle these sorts of problems by such creative means.

Though, through observation and analysis it becomes easy to lose sight of makes video games so damn good in the first place; they’re escapism. Generally game worlds tend to be over-the-top, but the most immersive ones always keep themselves much grounded in reality while maintaining the fantastic. This is how I've been treating the Mass Effect franchise as I tend to turn off the analysing portion of my brain and turn on the "I'm Commander Shepard and I can only think about saving the galaxy from the Reapers... on the Citadel" portion of my brain. I think it’s important to try and keep that distinction but at the same time it is extremely important as a student of game development to be able to catch these things, especially when I want to make games similar to it.