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[dv_]

Hi,
I am implementing static ambient lighting for scene geometry right now. First I wanted to use lightmaps as usual, but then I started to think about it: is this *really* the way to go? Nowadays the geometry can be highly tesselated, and direct lighting works well per-pixel, so why not simply encode the indirect lighting in the vertices? Its low frequency anyway..

It removes the batching issue (using lightmaps and batching together is hard), and removes the need for a texture atlas. Also, I can do ambient occlusion per-vertex, adding bent normals to the vertices - this way I even get some interactivity.

Do you have some opinions about this?

[Reedbeta]

This is the way HL2 does static lighting, I believe. You can also store the average incoming light direction and color per-vertex and thus do glossy surfaces as well as diffuse ones.