How should I implement more than 8 lights in OpenGL?
I would like to render unlimited amounts of lights efficiently.
So, whats the preferred method for doing this?
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How should I implement more than 8 lights in OpenGL?
I would like to render unlimited amounts of lights efficiently.
So, whats the preferred method for doing this?
Deferred shading.
In a nutshell you render your scene without any lights. Instead you store the normals and world positions along with the textured pixels into multiple frame-buffers (so called render targets). You can even do this in a single pass if you use a multiple render-target extension.
Once you have your buffers prepared you start to render a bunch of full-screen quads, each with a pixel shader program that reads out the normals and positions and computes the light for one or multiple light-sources.
Since light is additive you can render as much full-screen quads as you want and accumulate the light for as much light-sources as you want.
A final step does a composition between your light and the unlit textured frame-buffer.
That’s more or less the state-of-the-art way to do it. Getting fog and transparency working with such a system is a challenge though.