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Just an Idea, but could you not use smoothing groups to make some super nice looking lighting with sharp edged shadows?
Look at Perfect Dark for the N64, they made some really nice lighting using what appears to be a trick with smoothing group:
http://i.min.us/i3utO.jpg
Also, is it possible to have baked in lights flicker or animate in color? What about using gels?
That would be real easy to test but i'm pretty sure it does.
Yea, as soon as I posted I decided to search these forums and found someone talking about using them in a previous post so I changed the OP to the other part of my question. I'm a little trigger happy on my posting.
perfect dark used vertex colouring for simulating lighting.
the reason theyre cut into the geometry, is because you need verts there to actually shade it.
they're not dynamic in any way, and 100% static.
I new they lit it by using the verts but I didn't expect vertex couloring. I wouldn't suppose that halo 2 supports that. Couldn't you still achieve a similar effect with some clever smoothing groups usage?
Also, regarding them being static or dynamic, most people miss this part of the game, but you can shoot out a lot of the lights if you find the source. When you shoot them out, only that particular light and its shadows are affected, thats fairly dynamic. they can't move though, as that would require new geometry, so not entirely dynamic.
lights being shot out = gelmaps i'd guess, but vertex colouring/lighting (usually) can't be updated on the fly, and is static.
i suppose nowadays with unrealengine for example you propably could if you wanted too, but anything pre-dating unrealengine3 propably won't be capable of it.
(it being prerendered n all)
As for halo2 supporting vertex colouring, i really don't know.
I would think it does, because vertex colours can be applied to a whole load of effects (blending/multiply colour/heightmapping/lighting/etc)
You'd have to look for yourself really, because i've never actually worked with halo2