This week was a busy week but it was also exciting week. We finally had a look into lighting. Lighting is such a pivotal part in a game; with lighting it can completely change the mood and feel of the game, it can make things look much nicer, it can also make things look realistic, but it can also ruin a game if done incorrectly. Lighting can become a very expensive component of a game but there a ways around to balance performance with visual quality. Adding to that I looked into a simplified view of the rendering pipeline for 3D graphics.

Initially the GPU grabs all the vertices to display all the points, these points and then translated into primitive shapes through a rasterizer, once this shape is made it is fed into a fragment processor to then fill out the primitive shapes, this shape filled with pixels is then shaded and then displayed. This is the way a 2D screen handles drawing 3D objects.

The way lighting is set up defines what the final output of the camera will be. As mentioned earlier lighting can be used to make things look and behave realistically. Within unity there are multiple types of lights with their own properties and behaviours. These lights can be edited in various ways; with things like color, strength, range, intensity, the type of shadow this light will create, etc. Adding to that since lighting can be such an expensive activity for the GPU there is the possibility to “bake” the lightmap once and then load it into the scene, this reduces the strain the GPU has every frame when drawing every change in the shadow.

Lighting is also very important because it will be working in conjunction with the textures the animators give us so we have to show them what it looks like on 3ds Max and Unity and so lighting will work in conjunction with shaders which is the topic we will be going over next week.

For our game we should have lighting set up as not only would it increase the appeal to our game it is also important because of the areas we have and the objects within them should be brought out or emphasized more because of the lighting.

I have made some good progress on creating the inventory system for the game; it will be a regular inventory system where you can pick up items, equip them, change their position, remove them, etc. I was looking forward to creating this part of the game and I am also working on making it that I will be able to use this in other projects. I also have to speed up the progress of my work and the groups work in order to avoid falling behind as 1 of our team members has still not completed any work yet.