Learn more about how Enlighten works.

The Benefits of Using Enlighten in Your Engine

• Improve your game lighting with high-quality realistic global illumination from many dynamic light sources.
• Provide lighting artists with instant feedback on their lighting changes, rather than waiting hours for a bake.
• Give game designers the freedom to create experiences that depend on indirect lighting.
• No need to work around the limitations of static lighting: Enlighten delivers improved lighting quality and reduced development cost.
• Minimal runtime cost for static light sources, using high-quality baked lighting with real-time previews.

The Enlighten SDK

The Enlighten SDK provides tools and libraries you can integrate with your engine to build the Enlighten lighting pipeline. Enlighten integrates with common methods of authoring a scene for a real-time renderer.

A typical renderer based on a hardware-accelerated API operates on a scene containing geometry in the form of triangle meshes. The definition of a mesh generally corresponds to the smallest unit of geometry that can be drawn with a single API call. Meshes can be composed together to form more complex objects or pieces of scenery. Some meshes are static, and others can move at runtime. Some meshes are rigid; others can be deformed by skeletal animations.

The Enlighten Pipeline

The two key components of the Enlighten pipeline are the Enlighten precompute and the Enlighten runtime.

• The Enlighten precompute takes your scene geometry as input, then computes and outputs optimized runtime data.
• The Enlighten runtime takes the precomputed Enlighten runtime data as input, along with the lighting configuration and material color information provided by the engine. The Enlighten runtime solves radiosity and produces three types of output: lightmaps, probes and cubemaps. These Enlighten outputs contain only diffuse indirect illumination, consisting of multiple bounces from many light sources. Your renderer samples these outputs to provide indirect lighting for each mesh.

Radiosity

Enlighten uses a version of the radiosity algorithm to compute indirect lighting. The Enlighten precompute divides surfaces of the scene into chunks, called clusters, and then computes visibility form factors between all pairs of clusters. The Enlighten runtime progressively solves the radiosity equation, with one bounce per iteration for an unlimited number of iterations.

Smaller cluster sizes provide greater accuracy in the indirect lighting, but increase the computation required in the precompute. For real-time rendering, relatively large clusters provide sufficient accuracy with minimal computation time.

Asynchronous Updates

The Enlighten runtime runs entirely asynchronously on the CPU alongside the main renderer, without blocking rendering. It's generally not necessary to update the indirect lighting at the full frame rate. Decoupling Enlighten updates from the rendering means you can tune performance by trading processing time for latency in the lighting. This is particularly useful when the renderer is already pushing the GPU to its limit to hit a fixed framerate target, such as 60FPS on consoles, or even 90FPS in VR/AR applications.

Fast Iteration

Though Enlighten offers complete control over all aspects of scene configuration, in practice, much of the configuration process should be automated. Before running the Enlighten precompute, you can change the lightmap resolution, light probe density and the location of cubemaps used for reflections. After the precompute, the lighting artist can iterate on the lighting setup with instant feedback on their changes. The artist can then tweak and experiment with the lighting until they get the result they want.

Enlighten Instructional Videos