Introduction
The Beast SDK, referred to throughout this documentation simply as Beast, is a lighting and global illumination solution for 3D video games and simulations. Using Beast, game developers can increase the realism and believability of their game worlds, and can create distinctive and memorable lighting effects that increase the dramatic power and immersion of the games they create.
Features at a glance
A selection of the main features of Beast:
- Accurate and fully configurable lighting and global illumination algorithms that support direct and indirect lighting, color bleeding, emissive effects, soft shadowing, ambient occlusion, image-based lighting, etc.
- Multiple types of light source primitives: point lights, spot lights, directional lights, sky lights, window lights, area lights and ambient lights.
- Results can be baked to light maps, atlased light maps, vertex maps, fully shaded still images, or "point clouds" that can be used to apply global illumination to dynamic objects as they move around in the game world.
- Live previews of the final lighting, either directly in your level editor or in the standalone eRnsT viewer/editor.
- Live scene authoring: add, move, delete, and modify shapes interactively.
- The Distribeast framework, which distributes calculations across multiple computers in a render farm.
Supported platforms
Beast and its tools (eRnsT and Distribeast) can be used on 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 or later.
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