Lighting and Shading

Types of Lighting

• Ambient
• Diffuse
• Specular
• Emissive

Ambient

Ambient lighting is basically natural light that is always visible on an environment or an object. In terms of video games it is best to use ambient lighting in various scenes and models to give them a more realistic look and feel.

Diffuse

Diffuse lighting is a soft light that is scattered and gives off a smooth reflection on a surface. By looking at the the image below you can see that the light is very smooth and soft and the and gives the ball a more believable look.

Specular

Specular lighting gives off a spotted highlight which gives off the light source location. As shown below the spheres have a diffused lighting but also has a spec of light on the left side as well. Specular light is the shiny spot of light seen in many objects. This gives off a more realistic look.

Emissive

Emissive lighting represents the original light source like the sun or fire.

With all the various lighting used in objects in your game the overall mood will become very appealing. It will also look very natural and realistic.

Shading

Toon/Cel Shading

Toon or sometimes called Cel shading is a type of shading in which the object looks cartoony like a Photoshop drawing.

Multi-Pass Lighting/Rendering

This process occurs when the scene is rendered more than once adding more light to it every time. By doing this, the rendered scene will not just look plain. It will be a scene with depth and realism.

Deferred Lighting

Deferred rendering is the event in which you render the fragment used for shadowing into textures. This way every pixel is then calculated and can be rendered as geometry.