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Valve just detailed some of the lighting and shader improvements made to the Source Engine that were added during the Operation Wildfire and de_nuke update that was released last week.
These visual upgrades will allow for community map makers to really make their creations look as good as possible. An overview of some of these numerous changes are detailed in this Counter-Strike.net posting.
There are updates and improvements to displacement surface lighting and shadows, cascade shadow maps, normal map blending, anisotropic reflection emulation, and tons more. An example of just one of the improvements can be seen below.
These visual upgrades will allow for community map makers to really make their creations look as good as possible. An overview of some of these numerous changes are detailed in this Counter-Strike.net posting.
There are updates and improvements to displacement surface lighting and shadows, cascade shadow maps, normal map blending, anisotropic reflection emulation, and tons more. An example of just one of the improvements can be seen below.
CASCADE SHADOW MAPS (CSMS)
One last thing we wanted to upgrade was how our cascade shadow maps interact with pre-computed lighting in our levels; Cascade shadow maps (CSMs) are our dynamic, high quality real-time shadows which can be seen in outdoor areas of Nuke and other maps.
To tackle this problem we separated all direct and indirect precomputed lighting data and use these two data sets to accurately blend our cascade shadow maps into the scene. This allows indirect and ambient lighting to alter the shadow color and strength in a much more natural way:
BEFORE Note the grey area between the CSM and the precomputed shadows. The CSMs don’t know what color the ambient indirect light is and cannot blend accurately.
AFTER With indirect lighting data available, the grey is gone and the CSMs now blend perfectly with the blue ambient lighting.
One last thing we wanted to upgrade was how our cascade shadow maps interact with pre-computed lighting in our levels; Cascade shadow maps (CSMs) are our dynamic, high quality real-time shadows which can be seen in outdoor areas of Nuke and other maps.
To tackle this problem we separated all direct and indirect precomputed lighting data and use these two data sets to accurately blend our cascade shadow maps into the scene. This allows indirect and ambient lighting to alter the shadow color and strength in a much more natural way:
BEFORE Note the grey area between the CSM and the precomputed shadows. The CSMs don’t know what color the ambient indirect light is and cannot blend accurately.
AFTER With indirect lighting data available, the grey is gone and the CSMs now blend perfectly with the blue ambient lighting.