Lighting on Final Fantasy 13.

I have played Final Fantasy 13 only about three hours. I think it is using forward shading; if I am wrong, I will be very surprised.

I couldn't figure out how they lit the objects. It seems to use more than one light, but it is definitely not deferred shading nor pre-pass-lighting.The game heavily uses cut-scenes. They are pre-rendered movie clips. It is easy to differentiate because the movie clips use a lot more lights than the game play scene.

I have seen pre-baked shadows as well as one high resolution shadow map with PCF; I guess.

Forward shading is still effective method. It can utilize MSAA with low cost and allows transparency for any objects.

Light buffer rendering with SPU

PhyreEngine implemented rendering Light buffer with SPU:

http://www.technology.scee.net/files/presentations/gdc2009/DeferredLightingandPostProcessingonPS3.pptWhen I was reading the ppt first time, I didn't pay attention to the SPU implementation part. After I read an article on GPG8, I found it is very interesting.

How about using PS3 for graphics data baking machine...

Occasionally the question comes to my mind whether we can use PS3 as a graphics data pre-baking tool. In that way, we will be able to take advantages of several SPUs.

One thing I am not clear is how to store the result data. It wouldn't be a problem with PS3 DevKit, but I am not aware of any means to store data from normal PS3s. Since Sony blocked Linux support, it may be harder than before.