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Indie Developer and Unreal Engine enthusiast known as grumbo continues working on Happy! the Hippo, an upcoming 3D platformer featuring "overpowered movement" and "PS2 jankiness", presenting a fantastic custom-made lighting system developed for it in Unreal Engine 5.
Developed with C++ in the unmodified version of the engine, the system enables its creator to set up striking 90s-style 3D renders, featuring phong shading and dynamic shadows achieved through custom light classes and a subsystem to manage them, which store all the lighting data in a texture and read it within the material. Going forward, grumbo aims to release the system as a downloadable asset and share an in-depth breakdown for those who'd prefer recreating it themselves.
"If you're just talking about the actual lighting data and not the shadow maps, it's a single render target," the developer explained. "It's resized dynamically whenever a light is added or removed from the scene – can't remember the exact size off the top of my head, but each light takes up one column of 3-5 rows of pixels. One for the light color/intensity, one for the location and radius, one for the shadow map index, etc. Spot lights and Rect lights use a few more rows since they have some extra data (direction, angle, etc.), so you could have a thousand lights in the scene, and at most it'd be a 1024x5 texture."
Follow grumbo on Twitter to learn more about Happy! the Hippo and to not miss the release of the lighting system. Don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our new Discord server, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, TikTok, and Threads, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
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