![\"\"](\"http:\/\/the-witness.net\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/before_after.jpg\" "\\"before_after\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe difference is not too pronounced in this scene, but with smoother-colored textures it becomes a lot more obvious (and I do want to use more smoother-colored textures, art-direction-wise!)<\/p>\n
The situation is, the lightmaps are HDR (for some definition of \"high\"), so we needed a way to encode those values reasonably into a bitmap. We were using RGBM where M is just an overall brightness factor; you read RGB from the texture then multiply by M to get the output color. We used to just encode this naively, but the problem is, when M is less than 1 then it actually kills precision in your RGB, so the solution is, well, don't ever let M go below 1; just clamp it. This is not rocket science and in fact is the kind of thing that is a little funny, as one starts wondering why we didn't think of that a long time ago, but hey, that's how it is sometimes. The results made me happy, though, so I am posting them.<\/p>\n
The improved image quality may enable us to have higher dynamic range throughout the game (this is probably something we will evaluate later on), which would be very nice!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s been a little bit since the last post. We have been busy doing a lot of good things with the game. Here’s one of them: Ignacio just got back from vacation and implemented a simple lightmap encoding idea that improves the color resolution of our lightmaps, removing banding, like \u2026<\/p>\n