Book Image

CryENGINE 3 Cookbook

By : Dan Tracy, Sean P Tracy (USD)
Book Image

CryENGINE 3 Cookbook

By: Dan Tracy, Sean P Tracy (USD)

Overview of this book

With every successive console generation, the cost, time, and complexity of developing games has grown. Meet CryENGINE3, a middleware engine that is the perfect fit for most developers allowing users to exceed current generation quality standards while using less people and time than ever thought possible.The CryENGINE3 CookBook is packed full of recipes for junior and senior developers alike. It covers everything from creating photo realistic architectural visualizations to implementing advanced physics such as ragdoll and tornado effects. Topics covered include the sandbox, level layout, environment creation, AI, character creation, creating vehicles, and game logic. Every recipe is designed to add AAA quality to your games. The CryENGINE3 SDK has many tools immediately available to developers of all disciplines. For designers the book has recipes for building up your own levels and populating your levels with intelligent AI and photo realistic assets. For artists we have recipes for practical workflow tools and techniques used when working with the advanced CryENGINE shaders and materials. For animators we have recipes that will bring your creations to life using skinned characters and advanced animation systems like locomotion groups. Finally for programmers we have recipes that show how to employ the core mechanics behind entities such as vehicles and weapons while also utilizing the strengths of the physics engine to create a unique and exciting game.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
CryENGINE 3 Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

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...