Geomerics, an ARM Company, today announced the release the Enlighten 3 with Forge advanced dynamic lighting solution for games. Enlighten 3 promises to deliver cinematic-quality dynamic lighting through an accurate real-time simulation of global illumination; or how light is transferred between surfaces in a scene.

"Lighting is the key to artists expressing their creative vision across all forms of high-end graphics, and gaming is no exception to this rule," said Mark Dickinson, vice president and general manager, media processing group, ARM. "ARM invested in Geomerics to enable gamers to benefit from the enhanced experience that advanced global illumination brings no matter what platform they use. The advances announced today place Enlighten technology at the cutting edge of game lighting quality and computer graphics."

New features include more accurate indirect lighting, color separated directional output, improved light map baking, and richer material properties. At the Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, Geomerics premiered the Subway Demo, designed using Enlighten 3. The Subway Demo showed how Enlighten's dynamic transparency adds realism and quality to destructible environments and enables new gameplay possibilities for game designers. With the further addition of Forge, a new lighting editor with full support for physically based shading, artists can create dynamic real-time lighting for their games with greater speed and control.

The Forge editor has a straightforward user interface and enables artists to quickly understand the capabilities of Enlighten and iterate on real-time lighting. Forge also provides a customizable foundation for integrating Enlighten into any development pipeline thanks to functionality from Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya, and a modular design. Additionally, the evaluation version of Forge integrates YEBIS 3 Post Processing from Silicon Studio to allow visualization of final-quality rendering within the Forge tool.

Enlighten is the lighting technology in Unity 5, is available fully integrated into Unreal Engine 3 and 4, and is used by some of the world's most successful game development studios.