Light Volumes

Although building light volumes is not as necessary in most of today’s more advanced games, I think it’s important to talk about the functionality. Light volumes, like collision geometry, are invisible boxes or spheres. However, these boxes or spheres are associated with lights in certain areas. The purpose of light volumes is to create conditions such that when characters enter a room that is lit completely red, they too will have red light cast on them. Remember that when you are using vertex lighting, there are no actual 3D lights in the scene, just lighting on a per-vertex basis. So it would look funny if a character walks into a red room and is not lit red as well. A lighting volume defines an area and lets the engine know what type o....