Ali Brown · Director of Graphics Engineering

Last time this came up, you promised you were going to lynch Todd Papy. So I think you should follow through on that promise and get him. Because we need technical ideas and thoughts on that, but we need the design. Is night vision in the future the same as now? Is it infrared? Is it based on some other form of technology? What I've mentioned in the past is that if you want to do it really well, then you emulate what we call spectral rendering, which is an incredibly complicated field. But there's elements of it you can simulate, where you can identify the materials that have a nonstandard way of reflecting infrared light, which would be anything that glows in the dark, or appears to glow in the dark, on an infrared camera, like reflective gear... I can't think of any good examples right now. But there's certain materials that don't reflect as you'd expect, so they need picking out especially. Otherwise, it doesn't look right in night vision. Otherwise, it's a type of filter. You need to take your colors and... It's a complicated topic. It's hard to break down. But what we see as red, green, and blue is obviously not the true picture of what happens in reality. In reality, there's millions of wavelengths of light, infinite wavelengths along a spectrum. And infrared is just looking at one portion of that spectrum. But the artist doesn't model what happens in that different spectrum. They just model what happens in these three specific spectrums the human eye can see. So we have to map or guess how we get from the artist's colors to the infrared spectrum, or whatever spectrum our imaginary night vision might be. And there's ways of approximating that. Or you can author custom textures if the artist can tell this is exactly what it looks like in infrared. But we clearly can't go and remake every texture in the entire game to show how the infrared would work; we'd double the textures in the game. So you normally do some type of automated mapping that takes a best-guess approach, and then you override the particularly special case ones. But yeah, it's all going to start with Todd and the request.