Ghost of Tsushima Lighting Probes
One of my Core responsibilities while working on Ghost of Tsushima was propagating and maintaining our Spherical Harmonic Light Probe system covering over 208 locations in the game.
SH light probes are secondary, diffuse light harmonics used to calculate and apply bounce from the Sun and analytical light sources within the game. These probes are applied within Maya proxies and then sent through the build and bake process which indexes all of the probe locations and generates tetrahedral meshes that are used to apply diffuse Global Illumination.
Ghost of Tsushima could only happen because of a Teamwork. Big shoutout to the team:
Lighting Probes: https://www.artstation.com/rianowens
Location Lighting/ Cinematics: https://www.artstation.com/gabysoto
Weather and open-world Lighting: Jeremy Forbes
Lighting Lead: https://www.artstation.com/toby_tobler
Additional lighting contributions by Alicia Archer, Carlon Addison, Jim Gibbs, and Stephen Jenkins
Location lighting done by Gaby Soto
Before/After Gif of a probe pass. As you can see Probes are important for getting our interiors to look right
Tetmesh Visualized Every Location in the game with a structure has a Tetrahedral mesh comprised of sample points placed in Maya
In some cases we used Interior Light probes for caves as well as structures
