Hey folks!

I've been watching the series start to finish and have gotten to the lighting portion of the series. I've been finding this part the most difficult part to follow, however, and can't seem to intuit how the multigrid lighting technique actually works.

I feel like for someone with prior knowledge of light equations / transports it might be intuitive, but I feel totally lost!

I understand the performance motivation behind the multigrid approach, i.e. sampling from lower res textures the further away you get from each pixel so that distant contributions (which are by definition more "averagable") are less expensive. But I don't really understand how the light transfer function works, what each texture is for, etc.

I would really appreciate a broad outline of the technique, because I'm finding it difficult to track anything at all in each episode!

Cheers,

- Jonny

It's been a long time since I watched those episode, so I don't remember the details.

What Casey is doing is experimenting with different ideas until he finds an acceptable result. The lighting will change a lot and even in the last episodes (I'm not sure handmade hero is still going on/will be resumed), the lighting isn't finished.

I episode 395, Casey seem to be using different texture resolutions to get a quick way to "simulate" light propagation. I think the higher resolution is for direct lighting (objects that are directly "hit" by the light) and going into lower resolution you get a cheap averaging of the light bounces (the light "hit" a wall or any other object before "hitting" the object).

I don't remember about the other textures, but they seem to represent the normal/specular of objects to be able to determine how (much) they reflect the incoming light.

Once again, I'm not sure about any of this.

I'm not sure handmade hero is still going on/will be resumed

Wait... HH is possibly dead?! Did Casey announce something?

I shouldn't have said that. I don't have any particular information. As far as I know Casey didn't announce anything.

I wanted to convey the idea that the lighting in handmade hero changes a lot during the series, isn't finished as of today, and you probably shouldn't use it as is expecting it to be directly usable in a game.