Introduction

Working efficiently with static lighting.

Scene Relighting

The Torque Lighting System provides a number of tools that speed up mission relighting and keep workflow as efficient as possible. These include filtered relighting, lighting profiles, and the ability to disable shadows.

Filtered Relighting

Filtered relighting improves performance by only relighting interiors in the vicinity of the camera. Filtered relighting is controlled from the Light Editor where the filter radius is set and relighting is selected from the menu item Relight -> Filtered Relight. While the Light Editor is open interiors within the filter radius (interiors that will relight) are highlighted with a pink bounding box.

Lighting Profiles

Lighting profiles speed up performance by reducing lighting accuracy. This is perfect for calculating quick and dirty lighting on newly created interiors or for quickly tweaking light objects. There are three lighting profiles; Production, Design, and Draft, which are selected through the Light Editor using the menu item Quality and range from the highest to lowest quality. The selected profile is persistent, so lighting performance can be boosted during the relight that occurs on mission load.

Shadows

Shadow casting can also be globally disabled, which increases performance considerably. Shadow casting is toggled through the Light Editor using the menu item Quality and is also persistent.

Performance Gain

As an example of the performance gains when using these options the following chart shows the relight times for an early and highly unoptimized version of the TGE Warzone demo (using TLK):

These times were based on full relights. Using the same profile and shadow settings with filtered relighting speeds up lighting even more.