Have any thoughts on writing a plugin to recognize types of lights from a cube map and being able to change the intensity of those lights afterward for Game engines? If it is worth, how useful it can be, I am doing a general survey to understand how worth it can be
So like, isolating the hotspots and then trying to turn those into conventional lights? I’ve done a little of that, it’s it’s kind of finicky if you are not using photometric units because in a lower dynamic range image you can run into something like a shiny reflection that tricks your algorithm into thinking it’s a “light”. But with some tweaking you can isolate the hot spots and then create directional lights based on the projected direction of the hot pixels. The tricky bit though is that you will only be able to get directional lights, at least in a conventional cube map: the angular values are recoverable from the cube but the distances is not.
At least when I tried it I had to fudge a good bit to remove the double brightening from having the cube map and the new artificial light both present.
The other potential hazard is CG lights vs real ones – my effort at this was in HDR cubemaps, so I had the physical sun or other physical light sources in my cubes. If the cube is captured in a scene and your lights don’t have lens flares or other physical embodiments they won’t actually show up in your cubes.