Autodesk Beast

Beast gives game creators advanced global illumination technology that enhances the look of games with little effort. Use Beast to pre-calculate lighting for light maps, shadow maps and point clouds, to bake occlusion or normal maps or to generate light fields for dynamic relighting of characters and objects.

An Artistic-Driven Workflow

Scaleform Workflow

Beast takes an interactive approach to lighting. Using eRnsT, an interactive lighting preview tool, artists can see global illumination results directly in the viewport. This enables artists to make changes quickly and painlessly, saving both time and sanity. Beast comes with an API that enables developers to integrate eRnsT into custom game editors.

Scaleform Workflow

eRnsT is an interactive lighting tool that ships with Beast. It enables artist to change lighting and preview the global illumination render interactively. eRnST can be integrated into a custom game level editor.

Why Beast?

Enhances the visual quality of your game

Beast gives your game more realistic lighting effects:

  • Color bounces and colored shadows from transparent objects.
  • Natural looking shadows affected by light bounces.
  • Soft shadows from point lights, directional lights and area lights.
  • Create light from a HDR environment giving natural lighting in the entire scene without adding a single light source.
  • Dynamically relight objects and characters using light probes pre-calculated by Beast. Lighting of characters and other dynamic objects is affected by emissive objects and light bouncing off other objects.

Boosts productivity

Beast enables artists to focus on the look of the game rather than tedious workflows. Beast automatically simulates natural lighting with colored shadows, color bounces and natural looking shadows. Lighting from high dynamic range environments creates natural lighting with little effort. Emissive materials automatically contribute to the lighting. Moving light sources and objects around in a scene affects the lighting without any need to add or adjust bounce lights or other workarounds needed to "fake" global illumination.

Reduces cost, risk and time-to-market

Beast has been used in a number of AAA titles to ensure that the visual quality bar is met on time every time. No matter what game engine you are using, Beast will help you get better results with less effort.

Pre-baked lighting vs faking GI at runtime with many lights

Baking lighting with Beast is an elegant method of improving the visual quality of the game without adding expensive cycles to lighting calculations at runtime. With Beast, you can increase the complexity of lighting to achieve beautiful imagery without affecting runtime speed. Furthermore, Beast uses true global illumination, which means that artists are freed from having to manage many light sources in an attempt to fake GI.