Geomerics to present new lighting tech at GDC

Lighting technology company Geomerics has launched a major upgrade to Enlighten, its award-winning game lighting middleware.

The new version focuses heavily on simplifying the workflow for artists working on games across an even broader range of platforms.

Geomerics’ will display the new release at this year’s GDC in its business suite (BS123) as well as in the ARM booth (booth #1124).

“With this release, we really focused on simplifying the creation of high quality lighting for artists working on games across any type of platform,” said Geomerics’ head of development Dr Graham Hazel.

Geomerics recently announced its support for the PS4, and its technology already supports the latest Windows PC, Mac and Linux machines, current generation consoles such as the Xbox 360, PS3, Wii U and PS Vita, to mobile platforms running iOS and Android.

In addition to extended platform support, Hazel explains that Geomerics has focused on making Enlighten as easy as possible for artists to use.

“Enlighten is being actively used by some of the largest development teams in existence. This is giving us a huge amount of feedback on where bottlenecks may occur in workflow,” added Hazel.

“The results of this feedback are that we are able to find increasingly sophisticated ways to automate processes.

“For example, in the past, artists had to set various parameters to control Enlighten’s performance. Many of these settings are now computed automatically. We basically adopted a design philosophy that allows Enlighten to do the sensible thing in nearly all cases, and only requires artist input for a handful of scenarios where the right approach may be ambiguous.”

Furthermore, Geomerics has a new integration into the latest Unreal Engine technology with a re-designed workflow that takes advantage of the latest automation features in Enlighten and of the latest editing and rendering features inside the Unreal Engine. Other features of the light tech include support for game scenarios, such static baked lighting through to fully dynamic, a plug-in for Maya and provision for ‘specular’ effects.

Geomerics founder Dr Chris Doran added: “I’m delighted with the range of technologies we are bringing to GDC this year. With both a mature product and exciting new research, we are really looking forward to a great show.”

For more information on Geomerics and Enlighten, visit its official website.