MLB 09 The Show for PlayStation 3 - Lighting Explained

222w ago - Senior Graphics Programmer for MLB 09 The Show Patrick Hager provided some more details on the lighting in MLB 09 The Show for Sony's PS3 console today as follows:

Lighting was a major focus for us this year, and we implemented a Global Lighting model. What does that mean? It means that objects are lit by their surroundings.

It means that when players are in shadow, they can still get light from the sunlight hitting the dirt just beyond the shadow's edge, or a bright wall behind them. It means that in stadiums, red floors cast red light on neighboring objects. It is another step towards that realism we all want in our baseball game.

How do we do all this? Well, I can't give away our secrets, but I can give you an overview of our lighting model. There are several steps we take to make each image, and we make 60 of these images every second.

Starting with the stadium:

• We begin by tracing direct sunlight into the scene, with detailed shadows.
• We render a sky (without a sun), then use this sky to add the indirect sky light to the scene.
• We then trace the sunlight's path as it bounces off the ground and stadium. When sunlight hits a surface, it takes on that surface color, bounces off, and lights objects around it. We add that indirect light into the scene.
• We do the same with the crowd (up to 50,000 people lit in place!)
• All of these steps are done in HDR (high dynamic range), and tone mapped into our final frame.

The players are handled in a similar way. They are lit by the sun, the sky, the stadium, and the ground around them. They also sample the environment to get reflections and gloss energy. The goal is to always make the player feel like he belongs to the world around him.

I hope you are as excited about this year's lighting as we are, and have a blast with MLB 09 The Show!