Multiple Lights

[Zwigby]

Hi all, it's my first post.

I was wondering what is the best way to approach multiple light sources?

How do the pros do it? Is it with shader and passing in a bunch of variable telling how many lights of what kind then going from there?

Thanks in advance.

Charlie

[EclipsE]

I've done it using arrays in shaders and making a light manager, which will contain all the lights, their directions etc...

[listentorick]

Any chance we could look at the source code for this?

[Chr0n1x]

Whats your performance on this? Generally one of the best ways to do accurate and quick multiple light sources is through deferred shading, there was a sample on www.ziggyware.com about it. Although it has it's drawbacks, it allows you to do the shadowing as well with the multiple lights since that can take a while being done normally.

[Arkcann]

I've been working on multiple light sources and have managed to have multiple point lights using a system that is quite intuitive and easy to change. However, I've only managed to get 4 lights working per vertex (while also doing ambient, diffuse and specular lighting) or 2 lights working per pixel (same thing, ambient, diffuse, and specular enabled) while using ps2_0 and vs2_0. Anything more uses to many math operations. Thanks for mentioning deferred shading, I've seen it on RenderMonkey but didn't realize how benificial it might be.

[Chr0n1x]

Problem is it seems to stop you from doing things like AA with HDR, I forget those details, but that doesnt make too much of a difference, all depends on how you implement it I guess.