What is Sunburn Lighting and Rendering Technology
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We are working with a new tool called Sunburn, and we have noticed that many people come across Sunburn Lighting and Rendering Engine and can’t absolutelly figure out what the hell this thing is. They read article after article but in the end still wonders: Is it a game engine? Is it a scene editor? What editor does it provide? What modifications to my current game do I have to make to actually integrate Sunburn to it?
This article aims to provide a quick and to the point answer. Here it goes:
1) What Sunburn is and what it is not
First, I need to say that Sunburn is a rendering technology (o rly?) for the XNA framework. Although the company that created it (Synapse) offers a different rendering technology forTorque 3D (Garage Games main game engine), Sunburn itself only works with XNA.
Ok, but what does it offer? Well, I had to purchase a simpler Sunburn license just to actually understand what Sunburn actually was.
Sunburn comes with what I will call here a “light editor” and a “light renderer”. In the “light editor” you will be able to load an EXISTING 3d scene (pure XNA or from the engine of your choice) and to create, move and edit the properties of light emmiters. That’s it. Very important: you can’t move your scene object, only the lights. So if you think that it is a scene editor (as I did), you are unfortunately wrong.
You can in fact change the normalmaps, bumpmaps, etc, of your objects but let’s be frank: you have probably already done that in the editor that you have used to create that scene.
Then, you will need to replace all your calls to your default renderer to Sunburn’s one. It doesn’t matter if you are using an engine or “pure XNA”, you need to do it. If you are a developer and you have access to your engine source code, this is probably not a big deal for you, and it is going to be well worth the effort.
So, what it is not: everything else. I doesn’t provide physics, input, sound, and everything. All it does is to put light on your objects, to create great crisp shadows, to make your scene look good.
In fact, I’m currently integrating it to the Ox game engine, to create a fairly simple but very good looking game.
2) Why do I think it it is so great
What you are going to gain with Sunburn is an amazing lightning system that is going to make your friends go “ooowww” at your scenes. Even the most dumb scenes looks great with Sunburn, solving an incredibly important part of game development: making your game look good.
If you are thinking that this lightining engine will only pay off for big and extremely “normalmaped” games, I suggest you take a look at “Crate Expectations”, which is made with SunBurn: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFTkSZ6DHc8 . It is a puzzle game.
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