Torque 3D Development - pureLIGHT
by Brett Seyler · 06/10/2009 (2:26 pm) · 57 comments
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!
About the author
Since 2007, I've done my best to steer Torque's development and brand toward the best opportunities in games middleware.
#22
pureLIGHT will be available to purchase pretty quickly I think. A few weeks? There is some remaining dev work to get it playing nicely with PostFX and Advanced Lighting. For sure it will be out and available by the time Torque 3D is ready for full release. We'll let you know :)
06/10/2009 (5:52 pm)
@Will: I *think* we'll probably have more information on the Luma Racing Kit (official name at present) this month, but the release might be more like July / August. As for price, we're still working that out, but I think your guess is in the right ballpark.pureLIGHT will be available to purchase pretty quickly I think. A few weeks? There is some remaining dev work to get it playing nicely with PostFX and Advanced Lighting. For sure it will be out and available by the time Torque 3D is ready for full release. We'll let you know :)
#23
Is this a licensing restriction or just a technicality? If, for instance, I wanted to purchase it for use with a game engine that runs on Linux, would that be against the license agreement?
06/10/2009 (6:28 pm)
Quote:The price is $500 per seat targeting PC / Mac / Web platforms.... 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.
Is this a licensing restriction or just a technicality? If, for instance, I wanted to purchase it for use with a game engine that runs on Linux, would that be against the license agreement?
#24
Well, it's a little of both, but Linux might be an option. I'll have to check with the pureLIGHT guys about it. Torque 3D's EULA has no restrictions on using it for Desktop / Netbook Linux deployment, but obviously Linux is not something we're supporting out of the box. It's a fair one, but let's defer this question for now.
06/10/2009 (6:43 pm)
@Tony:Quote: Is this a licensing restriction or just a technicality? If, for instance, I wanted to purchase it for use with a game engine that runs on Linux, would that be against the license agreement?
Well, it's a little of both, but Linux might be an option. I'll have to check with the pureLIGHT guys about it. Torque 3D's EULA has no restrictions on using it for Desktop / Netbook Linux deployment, but obviously Linux is not something we're supporting out of the box. It's a fair one, but let's defer this question for now.
#25
06/10/2009 (9:43 pm)
At this point we have no plans to port pureLIGHT to any other platform other than Windows (speaking of which, we have both 32 and 64 bit versions as well as multicore support). That being said, the output is really platform independent as long as long as your target supports the lightmaps and vertex lighting that pureLIGHT generates and the version of Torque 3D you are using supports it as well. Garage Games has been really great in working with us to make sure that pureLIGHT output integrates as seamlessly as possible with T3D. We realize this is going to be an on-going process and we'll be paying close attention to the feedback from users to help us improve pureLIGHT. We've been happy using pureLIGHT for the last few years, but there is always room to make it better. 
#26
One of the problems we've had with some automated light baking systems that we've tried is that they don't unwrap optimally with complex geometry, and in fact I have yet to see an automatic unwrapping algorithm that works great in those cases, and it has been difficult to get them to handle manually unwrapped geometry easily.
It will be a tough sell to get us away from Mental Ray at this point, but if it will handle manual unwrapping, along with the realtime preview, it might be possible :P
06/10/2009 (9:56 pm)
Good stuff. Hard to tell from those screenshots and Youtube video what the actual quality of the lightmaps are, but it's obviously a huge leap forward from from any of the previous lightmap solutions in Torque.One of the problems we've had with some automated light baking systems that we've tried is that they don't unwrap optimally with complex geometry, and in fact I have yet to see an automatic unwrapping algorithm that works great in those cases, and it has been difficult to get them to handle manually unwrapped geometry easily.
It will be a tough sell to get us away from Mental Ray at this point, but if it will handle manual unwrapping, along with the realtime preview, it might be possible :P
#27
But I did not see any shaders in the example. Will it work with normal- and spec mapping? If yes, then it could create quality similar to Source or Unreal-Engine.
I would love to see an example like this.
06/10/2009 (11:17 pm)
Hey, this looks amazing. The radiosity calculation is fantastic.But I did not see any shaders in the example. Will it work with normal- and spec mapping? If yes, then it could create quality similar to Source or Unreal-Engine.
I would love to see an example like this.
#28
The examples are strongly focused on indoor environments. What about Outdoor, how das the lightmapping work with all the ohter stuff like. HDR, Rays, shadows, normals, specs, paralax, DOF 'shaderstuff' etc. together?
Do you have a similar video of an outdoorenvironment?
What about the performance of this system (indoor/outdoor)?
Do i ship the lightmap with the product or will they be generated at startup?
thanx, and amazing work :)
Oliver
06/11/2009 (12:29 am)
Great work :)The examples are strongly focused on indoor environments. What about Outdoor, how das the lightmapping work with all the ohter stuff like. HDR, Rays, shadows, normals, specs, paralax, DOF 'shaderstuff' etc. together?
Do you have a similar video of an outdoorenvironment?
What about the performance of this system (indoor/outdoor)?
Do i ship the lightmap with the product or will they be generated at startup?
thanx, and amazing work :)
Oliver
#29
06/11/2009 (12:42 am)
@Oliver: All PostFX (HDR, Rays, Shadows, etc.) should be fully compatible with a pureLIGHT scene in Torque 3D. Putting together a video for an outdoor environment is definitely feasible. The bigger the environment, the larger the light map and longer to bake, but pureLIGHT supports this. We might, for comparison purposes, do this with Warrior Camp or even South Pacific. I expect the performance would still be very fast. 
#30
As an artist I realy would love to put PureLight through its paces and create some true T3D examples.
06/11/2009 (12:56 am)
If PureLight is baked into the world environment would it have any effect on a character? Would the character light according to light and shadow? For example it would be odd to go inside a dark cave and the character is still fully bright.As an artist I realy would love to put PureLight through its paces and create some true T3D examples.
#31
I assume that it will work on DTSs as well as DIFs and Terrain?
As well, it wont take up the 2nd UV channel that T3D meshes support, correct?
Thanks :)
06/11/2009 (4:49 am)
@Brett:I assume that it will work on DTSs as well as DIFs and Terrain?
As well, it wont take up the 2nd UV channel that T3D meshes support, correct?
Thanks :)
#32
06/11/2009 (6:41 am)
@Gerald: You'd be surprised how well our automatic unwrapping works. In fact one of our previous testers said we should sell that as a solution by itself. We support extremely complex objects and manual unwrapping. However, for organic shapes we recommend using our vertex lighting which is fast and saves a fair bit of memory. I should mention that our vertex lighting also has subsurface scattering so you can get some very nice effects on surfaces like marble or candles. I'll post some shots in my blog of some of our unwrapping and lighting on high poly organic surfaces. 
#33
One of the tests that I am doing for the PureLight guys is converting the whole Undercity level over into being lit predominently with PureLight. Here is a little "work in progress" sample of just the Undercity level mesh after some baking:
06/11/2009 (7:32 am)
I have had the good luck to be able to test out PureLight with Torque3D (mostly since they're just down the road from me, so don't feel upset) and I honestly have to say that the tool is pretty incredible.One of the tests that I am doing for the PureLight guys is converting the whole Undercity level over into being lit predominently with PureLight. Here is a little "work in progress" sample of just the Undercity level mesh after some baking:
#34
06/11/2009 (8:02 am)
I like the licensing approach to providing professional tools at an indie studio price. I'll be a customer!
#35
Okay, cool. When you say you support manual unwrapping, that means you support the unwrapping as a separate UV channel in the imported object(s)?
There are 2 major problems that always seem to occur with automatic unwrapping. The first is the spacing out of tiny UV faces, and when you have objects with small areas of high density polys and larger areas of large polys, the small areas end up taking up and wasting more lightmap space than the larger areas which is annoying.
The other problem usually comes from long skinny objects, which if you're lucky will get to use 10% of a lightmap, because unwrappers insist that texture stretching is *always* undesirable. Which it usually is, but texture stretching on lightmaps is preferable to miniscule lightmap coverage on long skinny objects :P
I will be interested in seeing how your unwrapping handles these things.
06/11/2009 (9:07 am)
@David,Okay, cool. When you say you support manual unwrapping, that means you support the unwrapping as a separate UV channel in the imported object(s)?
There are 2 major problems that always seem to occur with automatic unwrapping. The first is the spacing out of tiny UV faces, and when you have objects with small areas of high density polys and larger areas of large polys, the small areas end up taking up and wasting more lightmap space than the larger areas which is annoying.
The other problem usually comes from long skinny objects, which if you're lucky will get to use 10% of a lightmap, because unwrappers insist that texture stretching is *always* undesirable. Which it usually is, but texture stretching on lightmaps is preferable to miniscule lightmap coverage on long skinny objects :P
I will be interested in seeing how your unwrapping handles these things.
#36
I'm known to have thrown out a sexy voice or two in my time - I've even been known to have a more calming voice than Lara Engebretson.
Ok, the last part is a lie, cause nobody has a more calming voice than Lara :P
At any rate, great job on your hard work and slick product, David!
06/11/2009 (10:21 am)
Quote:Next time we'll get someone with a sexier voice ;)
I'm known to have thrown out a sexy voice or two in my time - I've even been known to have a more calming voice than Lara Engebretson.
Ok, the last part is a lie, cause nobody has a more calming voice than Lara :P
At any rate, great job on your hard work and slick product, David!
#37
06/11/2009 (11:11 am)
I fall asleep every night, listening to the soothing Torque Tutorial videos. 
#38
pureLIGHT does make use of the 2nd UV channel on DTS/Collada shapes.
It is not directly supported for TerrainBlock or Interiors. For Interiors there will be a pipeline for getting your shape into a pureLIGHT compatible format.
06/11/2009 (11:13 am)
Luke,pureLIGHT does make use of the 2nd UV channel on DTS/Collada shapes.
It is not directly supported for TerrainBlock or Interiors. For Interiors there will be a pipeline for getting your shape into a pureLIGHT compatible format.
#39
How come you guys have to go add all this cool stuff once I start making 2D games? Becoming so tempting to make some cool Torque art again.
06/11/2009 (11:45 am)
Beautiful, Pat was showing me this last week and I was really impressed, good lightmaps make such a huge difference. How come you guys have to go add all this cool stuff once I start making 2D games? Becoming so tempting to make some cool Torque art again.
Torque 3D Owner Will Zettler
Cool, off topic questions... do you know when that racing kit might be released? does it have a name other then the racing kit? and do we know when a blog about it might be abound and maybe a guess range price? I am going to go out and say $500 as well, but I don't like to get ahead of myself. Thanks for the info Brett. :o) Oh and BTW do we have a release date for this PureLIGHT program? Thanks again
Will