Playing Through Space Gaming's Past, Present and Future
Hey folks, in this installment of NOMAD, I get into a lot of scrapes, do a ton of trade, and then lose it all because I got overconfident. No, seriously, my ship blew up, was rebuilt, and I lost all the cool stuff I’d gained. This game does not mess AROUND y’all. ;) Check out my endeavors in this latest video, and thanks for watching!
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Gouraud shading and Lambert shading are polygon “lighting” models, roughly, though in games we historically haven’t always used the term quite correctly. In games of this era, gouraud is when the polygon has lighting values for each vertex (ie: corner), and the lighting is interpolated between corners. It also used to be called “smooth shading”. Lambert was often “flat shading”, and is when the polygon has one global light value.
Lambert’s cheaper to calculate.
If there were actual emulated light sources involved (as opposed to models that were simply pre-lit), then the value of the light was calculated based on the angle between the light source and a “normal”. The “normal” was a surface normal for Lambert (that is, a unit length vector perpendicular to the polygon), and a vertex normal for gouraud (a unit-length vector positioned to light the corner nicely).
Hah, I read that, but all I heard in my head was:
;)
tl;dr: lambert’s a single solid color, gouraud is a gradient.
Ohhhh, okay! ;)