Quote:
Originally posted by Adair
The reason the game looks so good is not due to a high polygon count though. What they actually did is they created high poly characters and did their lighting effects on them. Then they made lower poly characters and somehow told the rendering engine to light the lower poly characters in the same way as the high poly characters.
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Not really. The models are originally made at about 1 mil or so poly count, then they are run through John Carmack's program which generates a 5000 or so poly model that uses bump mapping to attain nearly the same deatail as the million poly count one.
You are also slightly mistaking about the lighting. No lighting work is done the models. Unlike in any previous 3D engine, all lighting is done real-time, in-engine. There are no pre-rendered "light maps" or anything. So now light is scalable, stackable with other lights, etc. Before any lighting had to be anticipaed and pre-rendereed.