More eye candy making its way to Unreal Engine 3
The Unreal Engine 3’s eye candy is about to get even prettier. How? By incorporating a global illumination system, that’s how. Epic Games and rendering technology developer Illuminate Labs have entered a deal, making global illumination a part of Unreal Engine 3.
Beast, Illuminate’s global illumination system, will allow the Epic engine to have more realistic lighting. This system takes into account not only the light that comes directly from a light source, but also cases where light rays from the same source are reflected by other surfaces.
Under the terms of the agreement, Illuminate Labs will join Epic’s partners program, and its technology will be available to any publishers or developers that license Unreal Engine 3.
Beast is also a platform-independent baker that uses the FBX file format, which allows users to add baking functionality to 3D asset creation tools. The new Beast features include:
- Global Illumination baking;
- Skylights from HDR images;
- Baked soft shadows with transparency.
With all these new effects, how does it affect the average PC? Not very good, I’m afraid. Such lighting would take more computations to generate, making things more difficult if you have a year-old rig or video card. If you want to see this new eye candy in all its glory, focus your attention on future games that will use Unreal Engine 3.
