Games - Lightmap

	Games - Lightmap

A Lightmap is a data structure which contains the brightness of surfaces in a game. Lightmaps are precomputed and used for static objects. Quake was the first game to use lightmaps to speed rendering while preventing floors from looking distorted. Before lightmaps were invented game engines used Gouraud shading for the floors and walls which caused shimmering. The most common methods of lightmapping are to either precompute vertex lighting by using distance from each vertex to a light, or by using multitexturing to apply a second texture which contains the lumel data.

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