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While PoE1 was rather static. I felt the lighting that was their looked great. From some of the preview scenes of Deadfire the lighting does not look nearly as great as what I would expect a pre-rendered game to achieve. Though I'm assuming this is because we are seeing WIP. Surely they'll let the scenes render as long as possible with the highest fidelity of parameters for all their lighting maps come release. Before anyone says it looks fine. I think the problem arises for certain geometries. Especially smooth or orderly surfaces. Like stone buildings. The lighting sources seem to leave their "presence" on those surfaces.

Update by Adam Brennecke, Lead Programmer and Executive Producer Over a year ago, in Update #49, we showed you the first movie of Pillars of Eternity. The movie showcased a beautiful scene in the Dyrwood complete with dynamic lighting, per-pixel occlusion, dynamic water and waterfall, and a day-night cycle. In this update I would like to give you an inside look on how these images are put together and rendered in the game, and I will cover new rendering features that we've added over the past year to address feedback from our backers about how our characters look in the scene. Warning: things might get technical! E3 We are going to be going on update hiatus for the next three weeks as we prepare for E3 in Los Angeles. After E3, the next update will feature the final classes covering The Front Line (fighters and barbarians). At E3, the team will be showing Pillars of Eternity at the Paradox booth behind closed doors. To avoid spoiling what we will be showing, we will be saving these moments until you get to play it. Because we want to include you in the experience, we will be taking photos at the booth, and in a future update we will be sharing more screenshots from the demo. To give you a small taste, here's a sneak peek at a scene that will be shown at E3: Rendering TimeBackgrounds As we mentioned previously, our beautiful backgrounds are rendered out of Maya as a 2D image. They are very large images, sometimes over several gigabytes of raw data, and before the images get into the game we run a program that compresses the data. Maya renders out the backgrounds in four layers or "passes": final, depth, normal, and albedo. These passes are combined together in Unity for per-pixel occlusion of 3D objects, and for real-time dynamic lighting. When we bring the backgrounds into the game, they look like a flat 2D plane, and when viewed in Unity's editor the whole world has an awkward skewed look to it. The illusion comes together only when an orthographic camera is placed at the perfect angle. Characters Next we overlay the 3D world on top of the 2D rendered image. The characters are dynamic 3D skinned meshes that are animated and then rendered into the scene with a variety of shaders and materials. Our default material that we use on most characters includes a normal map (adds tiny variations in surface detail), specular map (adds shininess), and an albedo map (adds the base color). The default material also supports a tint map, which allows our designers and you to customize the colors of armor, hair, and skin. We have other shaders that can change the look and feel of characters. For example, we have a metal shader for armor that adds an extra level of shininess and can reflect the environment via an environment map. A Cloth shader removes the shininess, and allows the character artists to make outfits made up of cotton, wool, and satin. We have special materials, like an emissive shader that isn't affected by light, used for the fire-godlike, ghosts, spectres, and the windows seen in the screenshots and video. Because the characters are 3D, they need to be lit differently than the background image. We use a system with two directional lights. The first directional light is the key light and typically matches the sun color and intensity in outdoor scenes, and this light can be modified by the day-night cycle to cast moonlight at night. The second directional light is used as a fill light to make sure the "back side" of a character isn't in total darkness. The two lights are adjusted per scene depending on the pre-rendered light settings to match the sun direction, mood, and desired atmosphere. In addition to the directional lights, we use dynamic deferred lights that can affect the background and characters. For example, if a torch is placed in a scene, the torch can illuminate both the 2D environment and a 3D character standing nearby. In addition, deferred lights are used for spell effects; a fireball explosion emits a burst of light, brightening up a dark dungeon room. Bringing it all together We noticed, and so did many of you, after releasing our first few screenshots, the 3D characters were not matching the 2D rendered scene as much as we would have hoped. So we put our thinking caps on, and we came up with new features since our first batch of screenshots, including dynamic ambient and a shadow control system. To really make sure the characters fit in the scene, we came up with an ambient system that samples color from the 2D background, simulating a quick and dirty global illumination model. Characters pick up subtle color variations depending on where they are standing and what type of environment they are in. If a character is standing in a lush green jungle, it will pick up a subtle green hue from the light reflected off the environment. Game programmers love fast and cheap methods, and the ambient system gives us great results with little impact on rendering performance. Ambient before and after: Another feature that we've added recently to solve the issue of grounding characters into the scene is a system to shadow 3D characters when traversing into dark shadowy areas in the 2D image. The new system samples a low resolution image map which controls the contribution of the directional sunlight on the character, and to avoid double shadows, the same image controls the value of the dynamic shadow map. Lastly, to better match the 2D and 3D shadows, we color the dynamic shadow to match the 2D rendered shadow color (which often has a blue hue to it). Shadow Blending before and after: To tie everything together, we can optionally add post process effects. In this scene, we've added a very subtle bloom effect that effects both the environment and characters. I hope you didn't get lost in all the technical talk! The important thing is that we hope you like the end result. We are satisfied with where we are at, but we always have a few ideas on how to improve the look and quality of the graphics. Improving the look of the game will be an ongoing process until we ship... and beyond. If you have any questions, please ask in our forums! Thanks for reading.

Hi everyone I;m new to the forum and I hope I can contribute my thoughts to help Project Eternity in the best way possible. I've just watched the latest update **Water, Trees, Day/Night, Lighting... All That Jazz**, and i think it was fantastic. This is a huge step towards my most anticipated game since the realease of BG2 SOA. Lighting is something that I have a particular interest in. Nearly all games, including many of 2013's, havnt had very realistic lighting mechanics that work how light does in real life. This is the use of shadows and night lighting. The use of shadows and realistic night lighting wont just make the game have a realistic aesthetic, but will open a whole new area of game play. I have a few sugestions that I hope can help. Shadows I noticed in the most receint video update, the shadows stayed in place even though the sun set and eventually the moon came out it would be cool if these shadows can move while the suns position changes, this would make a more realistic feel, and certain areas would gain shadows during certain times of the daty and night. Night lighting (Mechanical and Magical) The main aspect I would like added, is realisiic night lighting, and how un-natural shadows from mechanical or magical lighting, effect the environment around the character(s) Let me explain how it works in real life. Say you are walking down the street after leaving a friends house. There are stree lamps to your left and right creating un-natural lighting so you can see where you are walking. However your eyes have naturally adjusted to the lighting you are looking at. So if you look away from the area litten up, and into a dark alley, your eyes take a certain amout of time to adjust and see what is ahead. So basically, you have a shorter sight while in the light and you almost walk blind into certain areas waiting for your eyes to adjust. This is an aspect i would love added to the game. As I mentioned earlier this would add certain gameplay aspects to project eternity. - It would be great to walk down a street and not be able to see what is in an alleyway unless i casted a spell of light into it or had a torch. - Certain characters could perform perfect assinations from dark areas and not be seen for a few seconds, giving valuable time to escape. - When camping in the wilderness you should have to have your characters face away from the camp fire to gain maximum vision incase you get attacked during the night by bandits or wild monsters. - Your *sneak/stealth* stats increases should you paint you're armour black while in the city at night. Or should you muddy you're armour and attach leaves during the day in the wilderness. This is just a few of the gameplay aspects I thought of in relation to realistic night lighting. I hope this is a valid sugestion. Please leave your comments and/or sugestions that could be added. Thanks alot Cheers, Bhaal_Spawn

I have been giving some thoughts to some of the technical problems with implementing dynamic lighting and realistic shadows in a "2.5D" isometric game. The thing is, dynamic lighting and realistic real-time shadows are something people have been working on for a long time in "true" 3D games, and it is not that hard to find and implement good solutions - in fact, Unity will handle this pretty nicely - see what they offer here: http://unity3d.com/unity/engine/lighting However.... Those techniques are meant for a 3D environment, and I just cannot see how they would apply directly to a "2.5D" game - I cannot see a simple, good solution (and I have done enough programming at the DirectX level to be reasonably familiar with the issues). What worries me is that if Obsidian decides to implement realistic real-time shadows, it would require substantial work, but if they don't, they might disappoint some people whose expectations are based on their experience with "3D" games. Personally I don't need to see real-time shadows - but I don't really know what expectations people have in general. .