Geomerics Releases Enlighten 3 with Forge
March 3, 2015, San Francisco—Geomerics, an ARM company, released the latest version of Enlighten and a companion tool called Forge. These software packages simulate dynamic lighting effects from global illumination for game developers, and the results approach cinematic quality for console, PC, and mobile devices.
The tool has evolved over the past decade to include dynamic, global, and scalable lighting effects for all platforms. As the game platforms have increased in performance, and mobile devices offering performance approaching the level of the last generation of consoles, the users are looking for a better graphics experience on all platforms. In general, lighting is the key to good visuals, and the increases in core technologies and performance allow all platforms to offer HD quality.
New features in Enlighten include more accurate indirect lighting, color separated directional output, improved light map baking, and richer material properties. Dynamic transparency adds realism and quality to destructible environments and enables new gameplay possibilities for game designers. The tool can access new material models for more natural images.
The company also released the latest version of Forge, a lighting editor with support for physically-based shading, for artists to create dynamic real-time lighting for their games. The tool enables artists to quickly understand the capabilities of Enlighten and rapidly iterate on high quality real-time lighting. It has a customizable foundation for integrating into any development pipeline and a modular design. Links and plug-in functionality allow the software to import Autodesk Max and Maya files and some of the game engines like Unreal and Unity have already integrated the tool. Additionally, the evaluation version of Forge integrates YEBIS 3 Post Processing from Silicon Studio to allow visualization of final-quality rendering within the Forge tool.
More specific feature lists and more details are available at the company website: http://www.geomerics.com
