Lighting the City of Glass

Presentation by Fabien Christin from DICE at GDC 2016.

Overview
Designing a big city that players can explore by day and by night while improving on the unique visual from the first Mirror’s Edge game isn’t an easy task.

In this talk, the tools and technology used to render Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst will be discussed. From the physical sky to the reflection tech, the speakers will show how they tamed the new Frostbite 3 PBR engine to deliver realistic images with stylized visuals.
They will talk about the artistic and technical challenges they faced and how they tried to overcome them, from the simple light settings and Enlighten workflow to character shading and color grading.

Takeaway
Attendees will get an insight of technical and artistic techniques used to create a dynamic time of day system with updating radiosity and reflections.

Intended Audience
This session is targeted to game artists, technical artists and graphics programmers who want to know more about Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst rendering technology, lighting tools and shading tricks.