Lately, ive been seeing alot of custom lighting frameworks, and ive been wondering how they work. Reading the code doesnt really give any insight, but what I do know is that it uses raycasts to calculate light.
What im confused on is how they actually render the light, an example:
Do you mean like the rectangle at the right side? Use a SurfaceLight which will emit a light in the size of the Part face you have it in.’
Make sure your Lighting.Technology setting is on Future.
There are different settings you can use to make surfaces render reflections more realistically. Also the Material of the Part makes a difference too.
The lighting in the picture I sent isnt future lighting, its Voxel with a custom lighting engine. I also saw the developer say its not baked lighting… How do they do it?
Ah, I’m not sure. Is there any way you can ask that developer?
Unfortunately not… they have their dms locked and they seem to be inactive
Looks like a lot of stacked SurfaceGuis or some clever beams
They also sent a video where they test it out, doesnt really look like beams to me… hold on a second;
Looks like it’s studio, so no external shaders are used. No viewports either by the rendering and distortion, so it’s pretty interesting. No idea what the reflections could be made with, but surely there’s a lot of glass material used, just not sure how and where.
Tbh personally i don’t see any interest in working with such technologies since it would be so complicated to maintain and keep performance in a universal way for all sorts of games, but we can guess it uses different instances such as beams, emitters, surfaceuis, gradients. Lots of calculation would be needed though for a realtime light engine. It looks cool for a demo for sure though
Ive heard of something called screenspace global illumination, but that still doest explain how the lighting is rendered… Yeah i agree there must be some kind of trick being used here
The developer also stated it is very optimized and they will be using it for their game, so its definitely not some one off gimmick… I am very curious asto how they did it
There used to be ways to have real time raytracing that worked with reflectance and glass parts until roblox released their anti exploit, i’m not up to date about this whole thing but maybe the community found a work around.
Hopefully someone can explain it here, its super interesting and Id like to implement it into my own games too
Seem like they used water for screen space reflection but removed the texture for less distortion:
For the custom lighting system I think they baked it except for the global illumination and here is the resource for something closed to that Custom Baked Lighting “Engine”.
For volumetric fog, Volumetric Lighting / Fog Implementation.
For global illumination, I can’t really tell if you have any footage with only light source and in an enclosed area which doesn’t have sunlight or only sunlight as the only light source and that doesn’t have too detailed screen for easier analyzing but in my thinking I think they just put at least 2 lights source in the same part one has less range but brighter one with far more range but less bright or am wrong.
The last footage showing real-time global illumination has built in baked lighting without it being separate unless it required for the effect to work, but I don’t think it radiance cascade since it would require them to deal with every pixel on the screen which is very heavy performance, or they used lower resolution, also the bottom back should be lightened up here by the sun which it isn’t? Unless am wrong about everything again, still that’s part of the back looks like it was done by baked lighting instead of real-time.
Also source where I get 2 light sources in a part for global illumination
Slightly off-topic, but if anyone is looking for a more techinical explanation about how proper global illumination and lighting works, look for a channel named Branch Education on a popular video site.
They have two recent videos explaining both ray tracing and explaining traditional rasterization / video game graphics in detail, the latter being the one that ROBLOX currently uses.
Best I could find is this page which supposedly is their own lighting system. It’s called Alare
It seems to cost 10 dollars although there’s a free demo. However Itch.io flagged the page as quarantined so I don’t know how legit this is
Oh my god, thank you!Ive been dying to find a channel like this
