Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >> I also assumed that scenery is always static in games so that you can 
> >> precompute light maps
> > 
> >   Actually nowadays games tend to use less and less precomputed light maps
> > and more real-time lighting.

> How is it possible to do that?

> (I'm not denying that games do it - they obviously do - I'm curios as to 
> how it's possible to do this given that the GPU only knows about 
> polygons and texture mapping.)

  The GPU also knows about vertex normals and can interpolate them and
calculate the lighting of the surface according to the normal. In a similar
way as POV-Ray does.

  Nowadays you can even write a shader which calculates the lighting from
the normal vector and positions of light sources in special ways, if you
want.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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