Killzone lighting tech firm partners with Gamebryo

Gamebyro engine owner Emergent has struck a new partnership with Sweden-based Illuminate Labs, the prominent lighting solutions company that has provided tech for games such as Killzone 2, Gran Turismo and Mirror’s Edge.

Developers who chose to license both Emergent’s Gamebryo engine and Illuminate Lab’s Beast tech will now be able to create global illumination lightmaps directly within the LightSpeed game editor.

This integration is much like Illuminate’s partnership with Unreal Engine owners Epic as well as the Evolution Engine.

In flaunting its own Beast engine, Illuminate said that the tech could “automatically” provide artists with “natural effects such as color bounces, realistic nuances in the shadows and soft shadows from the light sources.”

The company added that HDR environments can be used to achieve “natural-looking lighting” without the need to apply a direct light source.

John Austin, Emergent’s VP of partnerships, welcomed the deal.

“This not only gives games built on LightSpeed outstanding lighting, but it also makes it very easy for artists and designers to add global illumination to their scenes and to quickly see the results in the editor and in their games simultaneously,”