ABSTRACT
Lighting is a powerful tool; it drastically changes the appeal and perception of the scene. When done right, it enhances the mood, experience, and clarity of the game. When done poorly, the game becomes misleading, inconsistent, and distracting. This chapter explores how to tackle the lighting and baking of the games. Baking is the process of rendering and storing lighting information. The stored lighting information is used instead of calculating all aspects of lighting in realtime. The most common one is to render the lighting information as a grayscale map, multiplied on top of the model’s base color texture. In terms of current generation computer graphics, it is not the polycount that slows down the performance, but the complicity of lighting and shaders. It is also super helpful to learn composition and lighting techniques, so one have good art guidance when trying different lighting ideas.
