Creating image-based lighting

The concept of using image-based lighting brings many advantages but must be used carefully. As such, it is beneficial to know about its properties and combine different methods where useful.

IBL allows CryENGINE 3 to render very complex lighting situations; usually, this is done with an infinitely distant environment map.

Positive points:

• High quality

• Fast for many lights and even a complex environment is reflected

• Energy preserving specular power

Negative points:

• Works only well for local positions with distant emitters and reflection content

• Static content only

There are two distinct ways to generating an environment map or cube map from CryENGINE.

In this recipe, we will use the entity environment probe, which is the most convenient method.

Getting ready

Open a level in Sandbox.

How to do it...

Let's set up our own image-based lighting.

1. Drag-and-drop the entity EnvironmentProbe from the MISC section of the RollupBar.

2. Click on the entity property preview_cubemap to preview...