Unified lighting and shadowing

Unified shadow and lighting is a lighting model. One of its early uses was in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, a game developed and released by Nintendo in 2003.

Before implementation of unified lighting and shadowing, lighting and shadow information for maps would be static, pre-generated and stored, whereas lighting and shadowing information for characters would be determined at run-time.

Unified lighting and shadowing uses a unified model that generates the lighting and shadows for everything at run-time. This means that any lights will affect the whole scene and not only certain parts. This may include self-shadowing via shadow volumes, where characters can cast shadows on themselves. Today's animation and games use this technology to create highly soft shadows to make the gaming world more realistic

See also

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