The 3D Handbook
Part 8 — Building in the engine
Chapter

Lighting and rendering

Read these pages in order, or jump to the one you need.

  1. Real-time lightingTopicHow game engines light a scene every frame, the four light types, physical light units and falloff, how many lights you can afford in Unreal, Unity and Godot, and when to bend physics for gameplay.
  2. Physical light unitsKey termMeasuring light in lux, lumens, candela and nits instead of arbitrary engine numbers, so that sun, lamps and exposure behave like the real world and values carry over between scenes.
  3. IES profiles and light functionsKey termMeasured photometric profiles that give lights a real fixture's shape and falloff, and light functions or cookies that project patterns through a light; setup in UE5, Unity and Godot and what each costs.
  4. Light probes and reflection probesKey termPoints or volumes that capture light in empty space, so moving objects pick up baked bounce light and shiny surfaces get believable reflections without full ray tracing.
  5. Baked vs. dynamic lightingTopicThe central lighting decision in any project; what baking stores, what mixed and stationary lights do, what fully dynamic systems such as Lumen cost, worked lightmap numbers, and how Call of Duty, Fortnite and Metro Exodus chose differently.
  6. Global illuminationKey termLight that bounces between surfaces before reaching the eye; why it matters for believable scenes, and the baked and real-time techniques Unreal, Unity and Godot use for it.
  7. Ray tracingKey termFollowing rays of light through a scene to find shadows, reflections and bounce light; in games usually a hybrid with rasterisation, in hardware or software form.
  8. Mesh distance fieldsKey termA volume texture that stores, for each cell, the distance to the nearest surface of a mesh; Unreal uses them for soft shadows, ambient occlusion and Lumen's software ray tracing.
  9. Light leakingKey termLight, usually bounce or sky light, appearing where it should be blocked, such as through thin walls or into sealed rooms; caused by GI methods that sample the scene more coarsely than the geometry.
  10. Shadows and virtual shadow mapsKey termHow real-time shadows are stored in shadow maps, why cascades exist, how Unreal's virtual shadow maps give 16k-resolution shadows by paging, and what that means for Nanite, foliage and World Position Offset.
  11. Cascaded shadow mapsKey termSplitting the camera's view into distance bands, each with its own shadow map, so the sun's shadows stay sharp near the player without running out of resolution in the distance.
  12. Shadow bias and shadow acneKey termShadow maps store depth at limited resolution, so lit surfaces can shadow themselves in stripes (acne). Bias pushes shadows away to fix it, but too much detaches them from their casters (peter-panning).
  13. Exposure and post-processingTopicHow engines turn a high-dynamic-range render into the final image; exposure and EV100, auto exposure, tonemappers (Filmic, ACES, AgX), colour grading with LUTs, bloom and depth of field, and the debate about film grain and chromatic aberration.
  14. TonemappingKey termThe curve that squeezes a rendered scene's huge range of brightness into what a screen can show, and decides how highlights roll off and how bright colours change hue.
  15. Colour grading and LUTsKey termShifting the colours of the final image for mood and consistency, either with parametric controls or with a look-up table (LUT), a small 3D texture that maps every input colour to an output colour.
  16. Fog and atmosphereTopicHow depth fog, height fog, volumetric fog and physically based sky systems work in Unreal and Godot, how to use them for depth, mood and readability, what they cost, and how Silent Hill turned a hardware limit into atmosphere.
  17. Sky, clouds and volumetricsKey termPhysically based skies and ray-marched volumetric clouds that light correctly at every time of day, as pioneered in games by Guerrilla's Nubis system for Horizon Zero Dawn.
  18. Time of dayKey termA sun, sky and lighting setup that changes over the game's day, either by blending baked keyframes or by computing all light dynamically, with knock-on costs for shadows, GI, exposure and art direction.