Comment by kcb
11 days ago
There's been a rumor going around that developers move away from prebaked lighting primarily because it complicates their workflow.
11 days ago
There's been a rumor going around that developers move away from prebaked lighting primarily because it complicates their workflow.
Prebaked lighting is a rather crude approximation that only looks good in certain scenarios. Correct dynamic indirect lighting provides a much better integration between different scene elements and better spatial cues. Movable and static objects can share the same lighting model and you don't get an immersion breaking situation where e.g. the one door that you can open in a hallway stands out because it has worse lighting. It is an overall win, not just during production.
That rumor didn't exist 20 years ago when Half Life 2 had come out. Pre-baked was the only way to go. Now we have performant ray-tracing.