the synthetic lighting method was actually used in some of the Half life 2 episodes in a kind of Normal maps ++ method (basically normal maps with built in inte

the synthetic lighting method was actually used in some of the Half life 2 episodes in a kind of Normal maps ++ method (basically normal maps with built in internal shadowing) I wonder if valve still uses it, as they mentioned actually creating the source texture was fairly expensive and involved final gather type rendering a 3d scene with 3 colored lights :) (as opposed to just measuring normal vectors per pixel) edit: https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/apps/valve/2007/SIGGRAPH2007_EfficientSelfShadowedRadiosityNormalMapping.pdf https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/apps/valve/2007/SIGGR... edit edit: https://youtu.be/1ry67uHZSS0 https://youtu.be/1ry67uHZSS0 another fascinating use of a very similar technique