After watching @Dachsjaeger's excellent video explaining what was wrong with Halo Infinites lighting, I wanted to add a few of my own points on top, in another laymans terms style explanation with examples shown from my own indie title, #OverDose. 1/

Simply put, Halo Infinite uses a dynamic lighting system. This means that the main skylight which blankets areas with lighting during the open world segments will be constantly moving and changing position. Traditionally, games use a more static approach to lighting.

Think of a location in a game, such as TLOU2. Areas are created and then lit in the same principle as a photographer would light a subject. They will put emphasis on what they want to show by making it a focal point, but will have full control over the scene.

This is because the light they are using will not move and is pre-calculated to save on performance. Players are in these areas so briefly, the passing of time never seems to feel out of place, and as such you are allowed much more freedom to light scenes as you wish.

Halo, however, uses a fully dynamic lighting system. This means that you could play Level X one day, and then play it a few days later with the time of day, lighting and shadowing completely different. This is because its main light origin (the sun) is dynamic.

Think of your garden on a sunny day, and how you could move your chairs to look nice, all lit up perfectly. Leave them there, and come back in a few hours, and they would be in shadow, with completely different lighting.

In other words, you cannot light an outdoor location in the same way for a game like Halo Infinite that you would, say, TLOU2, or even Halo 4/5. These areas used static precompiled lighting/lightmaps, which can light the scene much prettier for sure, however its not accurate.

(Not to mention, their assets were authored differently, with some assets such as weapons having shadow and light actually painted into them. This means they always look nice, but are never fully accurate, and it shows badly in most scenes when you look for it.)

Any dynamic object in the scene in these games, such as moveable boxes, items and indeed characters, will not be lit correctly, as they will be lit from approximated probes. Its good enough, sure, but once you see the flaws its hard to ignore them.

Lets take a look at #OverDose, and how the position of the sky light can change the look of an area. Here, we can see normals pop in one pic but not another. Once we go fully in shadow, we can see normals become very faint.

This is become #OverDose uses per pixel lighting combined with an ambient light pass that approximates an average normal direction. If you don't approximate this, then in shadow no normals are drawn... AT ALL. And the assets become very, very flat. This...

...is what I believe Halo is lacking as once an asset moves into shadow (out of the main light source) the normals flatten far too much. But even when you use hard geo, the effect they have is minimised when in shadow, as seen here on this sheet metal, so its not foolproof:

Even AO won't help because the crevice is too shallow for the AO to have any sort of impact, so you are left with a very flat looking asset (even though you can clearly see definition).

So, outdoors are lit here (as in halo) with a combination of a main sky light and an ambient pass. We are looking into forms of GI and the like to help with light bounce FYI, which is more than possible for the XSX release of Halo.

So, what's the issue? What's wrong with Halo? in short, nothing. Its doing exactly what it should be. However, without a simulated light bounce in the form of a global illumination pass, it just looks "flat" and "bland".

Its also very under saturated compared to past titles, which is really obvious to my eye but appears to be a trait 343 enjoy doing. Can it all be fixed? Absolutely, yes. Look at the Gears 4/5 beta visuals compared to the final game.

I do feel they have some asset pipeline issues with some things, as their chamfering seems way too tight on some things, and on others its almost like there are no normal maps applied at all. Some weapons even look they have no albedo/diffuse and its just a solid colour!

And as we know, the build is an old one, too. How old? Well, I'm told as old as January. That doesn't explain why you show an old build, for your flag ship game, on a brand new system... That bit baffles me. This was supposed to be the big...

..."look at what we can do" moment but it just made people confused. IMO, they should have gone with Hallblade 2 as their graphical showcase, because the gameplay shown in Halo looks AMAZING, but the visuals left a bad taste for many.

In closing: This may seem like damage control. It's not. It's a technical talk, not about systems, but about engines and techniques. So please, don't bring that into it. And also, every asset you see from #OverDose here is made...

...by one person; myself. Sculpts, models, textures and all. I had to change course a while back after becoming life long ill and its amazing I'm still alive at all, so please, keep your nasty comments to other threads.

Any questions, just ask!

ADDITIONAL: Had a few PM's asking about view weapons and the same thing applies. If you use a blanket ambient light and then have no dynamic lights impacting the mesh, the same issue happens. Look the difference between this pic, with PBR and metals set up, as I move my view:

Then, look at this pic as I move my view weapon, with the same materials, but ambient light only and zero dynamic lights influencing the surface (NOTE: I've bumped up the base ambient brightness here for visibility). Same thing applies.