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Comment by gavanwoolery | Hacker News Reader

I'm a big proponent of unrealistic lighting in games, for two reasons:

1) Trying to simulate realistic lighting in realtime is a fool's errand - even with every trick we know, lighting can never look completely realistic on today's hardware.

2) There is a certain art to unrealistic lighting. We see reality all the time and it is fairly boring, why not take advantage of the simulation to produce something visually interesting? I recently revamped my lighting for an unrealistic, but stylistic look:

  http://i.imgur.com/t1gC4ME.png

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Side note: there's a recent push towards "physically based rendering" (in games; film folks have made that a few years ago). This means making light behave in a physically plausible way. This is different from "photo realistic rendering".

Probably best example is Pixar's rendering style - it's not "realistic", but it is very much at the forefront of "physically based".

This is partially because of difficulty of debugging a completely ad-hoc pipeline.

When you have 50 moving parts and the final image doesn't look right, it's hard to know where the problem is. Instead, you try to make each part adhere to "reality" by making them "physically based", thus enabling objective testing.

Yes. It can also be cheaper to make, since the same material can look good under more different lighting conditions. So an artist can make the textures & material once and it will mostly look "correct" when put in anywhere. As opposed to older ad-hoc models where often in a different lighting setup at least some parts had to be redone.

Just wanted to make a distinction between "physically based/plausible" and "photorealistic", since I've seen both being mixed up a lot of times.

Good point - I agree that we can learn a lot from the way realistic lighting works in order to produce stylistic results. For example, I do a bit of radiosity which is sort of physically correct but not nearly enough samples to be accurate, and it is done in screen space. Even though it is a far cry from "realistic", it does add a lot visually IMHO.

Obligatory link to Errant Signal's discussion of photorealism in games: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRTsl1jCqq8

Looks that we will see the hystory of art repeating itself in games.. imagine a "Van Gogh world" for instance.. with colors and shapes moving/morphing without pattern..

Also reminds me "Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari" where they were using expresionism in costumes, acting and in the set..

Probably tjats where the future of rendering is.. freedom from reality.. we already have one, isnt? :)

Couldn't agree more. Chasing that realism dragon is good for some things but a mistake for most.

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