Enlighten FAQ

What is Enlighten?

Enlighten is lighting technology used to simulate indirect lighting that you integrate into your own rendering engine and authoring pipeline. Enlighten allows you to simulate indirect lighting in realtime in your game engine.

Why use Enlighten?

Enlighten can massively improve the quality of your game lighting, providing a more immersive, higher quality experience. It will also dramatically cut the iteration time for lighting your assets.

Does Enlighten run in real-time on all current generation platforms?

Enlighten runs in real-time on Playstation®3, Xbox 360™ and PC. On other platforms (e.g. Nintendo Wii) Enlighten can be used as a static baking solution while continuing to provide workflow enhancements through in-engine real time lighting.

In what way will Enlighten improve my workflow?

Artists do not need to spend hours meticulously placing lights to simulate indirect lighting. Because Enlighten updates indirect lighting in real-time, artists can also see the effect of modifying lighting in a scene instantly. This means that artists can iterate on lighting more quickly, focusing time on creating visually stunning scenes and not on long bake times.

Is there any off-line process?

Enlighten performs a precompute on the static geometry in the scene. Once this is completed the scene can be re-lit, re-textured and re-coloured dynamically. Typical precompute times are 1-2 minutes per system. The precompute can be distributed across multiple nodes.

Can Enlighten be used in a static baking solution?

Yes, Enlighten can be used in a static baking solution. Enlighten outputs light maps that represent the indirect light bouncing around your scene. These light maps can be saved out and incorporated into standard baking tools and used statically at runtime. Alternatively, these light maps can be generated on level load if required.

Can I mix and match between static baking and dynamic radiosity?

Yes, Enlighten ensures consistency in all apsects of lighting. So, for example, you may chose to only turn on dynamic radiosity in certain areas of your game, or you may chose to bake is some of the lights and add dynamic lighting over the top.

How will using Enlighten affect the performance and memory requirements of my game?

Enlighten contains a number of parameters that allow customers to control the visual quality/performance balance of Enlighten calculations. Performance and memory requirements are therefore reliant upon your specific requirements; however Enlighten is able to meet performance and memory budgets in almost all cases.

Does Enlighten handle direct lighting?

Enlighten currently handles indirect lighting only, and does not deal with direct lighting. It can therefore be used alongside your current direct lighting pipeline. Enlighten is therefore totally agnostic on the types of direclt light source in a scene.

How many dynamic lights can I gave?

As many as your direct lighting renderer will support. Enlighten is not affected by the complexity of the direct lighting calculation.

Will lights that do not move impact performance?

No, Enlighten has ways of exploiting temporal coherence, including caching results from static lights.

Does Enlighten handle shadowing?

Enlighten handles indirect lighting only, and does not deal with the shadowing of direct lighting. It can therefore be used alongside your current shadowing pipeline.

How much additional authoring is required for Enlighten?

Enlighten works best at runtime if a simplified version of the mesh is provided. Authoring this is similar in workload to authoring a collision mesh or LoD mesh. Indeed, often either of these will suffice. The simplified mesh needs to be atlased, but once this is done Enlighten takes care of generating uv coordinates for the full detailed mesh.

Does Enlighten support streaming?

Yes. Enlighten partitions the world into discrete systems and these can be streamed in and out of memory as required.

Does Enlighten support dynamic geometry?

Dynamic objects pick up radiosity so naturally fit into their world. They do not contribute to radiosity, though than can be simulated if necessary. Enlighten supports a range of techniques for handling dynamism and destruction that cover the vast majority of game scenarios.

Does Enlighten support procedural geometry?

Procedural geometry is not a problem when used off-line, and can also be handled at runtime if the player is using pre-configured modules. Enlighten cannot handle geometry that is created entirely procedurally at runtime with no prior knowledge of visibility.

Does Enlighten work with deferred rendering?

Yes, Enlighten works with either forward or deferred renderers. DICE's Frostbite 2 engine is a good example of the latter.

Does quality scale up so I could use the same engine for cut-scenes or high-quality trailers and stills?

Yes, quality can be scaled up as required.

What types of material does Enlighten support?

Enlighten supports all standard material types, including dynamic emmissive surfaces. Surface properties, including albedo, can be changed at runtime. Semi-transparent surfaces will require some specific authoring.

How long does an evaluation of Enlighten typically take?

The duration of an Enlighten evaluation largely depends upon the size and experience of your evaluation team. We expect that a team comprised of an experienced graphics programmer and an experienced technical artist will be able to complete a basic integration and art evaluation within one month. However, experience shows that some customers are able to complete basic integrations more quickly than this.

What level of support does Geomerics provide?

Geomerics is dedicated to working collaboratively with your development team throughout your evaluation, integration and production lifecycle. Support requests will be handled quickly and effectively by the product developers themselves, and we encourage regular conference call meetings with customers to discuss integration progress. We regularly send developers out on-site to assist customers with their integration of Enlighten.