Week 9 - Lighting and Deferred lighting

This week we watched a conference video about God of War's lighting system and we also looked at deferred lighting.

 During the presentation they explained the process behind their shadows:

ZPrePass -> Cascade 2 -> WB Shadow Map -> Cascade 1 -> WB Shadow Map -> Cascade 0 *

* -> WB Shadow Map -> Opaque -> Transparent+Effects+UI+Flip

I'm really interested in learning more about their use of the white buffer and just the uses of the white buffer in general.

Our second lecture this week was on deferred lighting.

Deferred lighting is a screen-space lighting technique where the lighting is postponed or deferred until the second pass hence the name deferred lighting or shading.

One of the advantages of deferred lighting is lighting is now based on number of lights instead of the actual geometry allowing you to have a lot more lights in your scene. Some downsides to deferred lighting is that its difficult to do antialiasing, transparent objects still need to be done separately, hard to use multiple materials, memory bandwidth, and shadows are still seperate.