Chris Campbell · Lead Lighting Artist

Well, without them, and unfortunately still not having any ray tracing or something like that, you need ambient lighting in the game. A long time ago, you would just have a consistent ambient value, which would be some kind of gray or blue or taken from the sky color, so I don't know, some kind of orange. And that would just be projected throughout the entire world in a uniform way. But cubemaps allow us to account for occlusion based on the window, for example, or the ceiling or the floor, which makes things then appear darker, which gives you more depth of contrast between the interior, which is nice and dark here, versus the exterior out there. And the brighter it gets outside, I'm not sure how easily some of this will pick up on stream, but the brighter it gets on the outside, the cubemaps will recapture. And then you'll get even more light spilling in. So if we don't have any lights at all, you get already this nice base ambient lighting look. And if you want to actually see the cubemaps, I can turn on this little debug mode and I'll turn off the screen space reflections. So this is basically all of the materials just turned into a glossy kind of chrome mirror, for example. And this shows you what each of the cubemaps' reflection maps are picking up. So obviously towards the windows, you're getting a lot of this exterior lighting. And that's getting reprojected into the room. So when I turn it back on, you can see these highlights coming in on the more reflective surfaces. And this is without any additional lighting whatsoever. So this is just the base kind of ambience.