Torque 3D Development - pureLIGHT

One of the coolest things about working in games is the people you meet. Most come with very little pretense and often with great talent. Back in February when Logan and Adrian were working the Undercity map for us and Logan suggested I talk with this company called pureLIGHT Technologies. I'd never heard of them, but they seemed like cool people with good technology, so Matt Fairfax and I met with them at GDC.

Their demo was really impressive.

Unlike the other lightmapping solutions I'd seen, they were using an iterative approach to generating the lightmaps that showed the results in real time and allowed you to pause the light map generation, make adjustments, and either keep going or reset. If any of you have worked with the more well known light map generators out there, you know that you usually set the scene up, adjust your parameters for style and quality, then hit "go." Anywhere from 2-3 minutes or up to several hours later, you'll have a high-end lightmap applied to your scene, which may or may not show the lighting you actually want. With pureLIGHT though, you know exactly the lighting you'll get before committing resources to bake for hours.

So, on top of solving this painful problem for artists tweaking the look of lightmaps in their scene, pureLIGHT produces absolutely gorgeous results...




pureLIGHT light maps make this UE3 demo shine

The story here gets better.

Dave Chan and the other pureLIGHT guys I met with all turned out to be really good people who shared our philosophy about game development. For the past couple years, pureLIGHT has been licensed primarily to corporate clients for use in architectural visualizations and other non-game simulation. These licenses typically start at $25k per project, obviously no small expense. However, we were able to get the pureLIGHT guys on board with an approach to license pureLIGHT to you guys that fits well with the model we have today.

Rather than chase a dozen or so big license deals in the mid-5 figure range per year, pureLIGHT Technologies is looking for broad adoption of pureLIGHT by empowering thousands of developers to create high-end content. This was a perfect for us, and I'm *really* happy that we worked out a deal so that price wouldn't be a large obstacle. We haven't really set any artists loose with this tool in Torque 3D yet, but we did load some sample content that pureLIGHT Technology gave us to compare.




pureLIGHT light maps in Torque 3D

It's worth noting that all the scenes you see above run incredibly fast. In fact, pureLIGHT stands out as a really great solution for targeting Mass Market Hardware. Because all the lighting information is baked into your material, very little if any dynamic lighting and shadowing need to occur. You can layer dynamic lighting and shadows using Advanced Lighting in combination with pureLIGHT, but for broad hardware compatibility and blazing speeds on embedded systems like the Wii or iPhone, pureLIGHT rocks.





Like Torque 3D, pureLIGHT supports any 3D application that will export in the Collada format. This includes 3ds Max, Maya, and XSI. Dave's blog (not yet posted, but soon to be) will cover a lot more technical detail than this one, but please feel free to post any questions you can think of here in the comments, and we'll do our best to answer.

Price & License

pureLIGHT is an add-on, not part of Torque 3D, but it will be available here on GarageGames.com with a straightforward license. The price is $500 per seat targeting PC / Mac / Web platforms. Licensing for other platforms will be available as well, but you'll need to contact us directly (licensing@) for details. It's also likely that you won't need a pureLIGHT seat for every Torque 3D developer on your team, so on top of the super cheap per seat price, it should be very affordable for small teams to use.

Anticipating a few more questions with answers here...

Q. Why is this a "Torque 3D Development blog?"
A. The team had to do quite a bit of code work to get the pureLIGHT lighting info stored properly in Torque 3D's material system. There is also work involved in making sure pureLIGHT is compatible with PostFX and Advanced Lighting, so this is real dev work on Torque 3D. The cool thing is that much of this work done to ensure Torque 3D can easily import lightmaps from pureLIGHT makes the art pipeline generally easier to use and more flexible to extend or modify.

Q. Why isn't this feature just in Torque 3D?
A. It was never part of our roadmap, and frankly, no engine out there does this sort of thing. Many engines bake lightmaps (including Torque with Basic Lighting), but none do it with this kind of quality and precision. In any case, if this feature were in Torque 3D, it would be well worth the total $1500 price.

Q. Will the realtime lightmap generation show up in engine with the Live Asset Updating?
A. Not this go around Live Asset Updating requires a save, so if you saved a newly generated lightmap made with pureLIGHT for assets loaded into your scene, you'd see the results immediately in Torque 3D. We don't have pureLIGHT and Torque 3D talking to each other in such a way to do that as the light maps are being generated yet. That may be something we can look into in the future.

Q. Do I need to own Torque 3D to use pureLIGHT?
A. Currently, older versions of Torque (TGE and TGEA) will not easily work with pureLIGHT, if at all. Again, real dev work went into the material system in to ensure this was possible in Torque 3D. So, purchasing pureLIGHT under the license described above will require that you have Torque 3D.

If you're ready to move to Torque 3D, you can still get the pre-order discount.

$100 OFF Torque 3D pre-order discount

This discount will expire when we've released a final version of Torque 3D. If you're already a Torque 3D owner, congrats! Please remember to post your Beta 2 feedback in Torque 3D Private Forums. Thanks!

More development blogs to come. This is post #23.

Torque 3D development blogs:

• Post #1 - Kickoff
• Post #2 - Apparatus and Warrior Camp
• Post #3 - Luma's racing kit
• Post #4 - Josh Engebretson and Web Publishing
• Post #5 - Pricing and Licensing
• Post #6 - Pricing and Licensing CONTINUED
• Post #7 - Wetness & Precipitation
• Post #8 - Screeen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO)
• Post #9 - Matt Langley and the Torque Launcher
• Post #10 - Chris Robertson and Collada
• Post #11 - Depth of Field
• Post #12 - Advanced Lighting
• Post #13 - Soft Particles
• Post #14 - World Editor
• Post #15 - Pricing and Licensing ANNOUNCED!
• Post #16 - GDC Live Edition
• Post #17 - River & Road Editors
• Post #18 - Beta is UP!
• Post #19 - Light Rays, Undercity, and the Material Editor
• Post #20 - Mass Market Hardware
• Post #21 - Beta: Part Deux
• Post #22 - Marching Towards Beta 3
• Post #23 - pureLIGHT
• Post #24 - Lighting, Terrain, and Cloth
• Post #25 - Beta 3!
• Post #26 - Coming Soon!