Posted February 06, 2024 by dadako
A lot of my effort lands on the cutting room floor.
Have you ever watched videos of a certain game, and thought "how did they do that?". This kind of research occupies a good chunk of my time as a technical artist.
I felt these lighting techniques didn't represent early flat shaded 3D games. I was mixing too much "new" with "old". So let's take a look at how old games were actually lit:
Most "old" flat shaded works used pre-lit 3D with no actual lighting, sometimes with depth fog. Star Fox, Hard Drivin' and Virtua Racing are classic examples.
On hardware with a bit more power, directional vector lighting was an option.
So it makes sense that older games of this generation didn't have point lights at all.
Playstation 1 games had generous point lighting with vertex lighting calculations. For Bad Pixels, I'm using older techniques for daytime and night time lighting. At the risk of looking too "new", point lights didn't make the cut to exist in my vision.
The "cutting room floor" is true for movie makers as much as it is for game developers, or any creator for that matter. Artists have sketchbooks. Sculptors have a floor covered with scraps. Game developers have unfinished prototypes. To make something that follows a vision, a lot of areas get tested and discarded.