Rendering
Lightweight and flexible built-in rendering ideal for many projects and rapid prototyping,
offers access to lower-level objects for building custom rendering systems. Provided XNA
game component allows full lighting and rendering support with almost no SunBurn code (nearly 100% pure XNA).
SunBurn Pro, Community Games, and Studio offer Synapse Gaming’s advanced deferred rendering
system in addition to traditional forward rendering, allowing you to choose the ideal rendering style for your project.
Lighting
Distinctive unified lighting system allows objects to receive consistent dynamic lighting.
Full range of dynamic light types including: point/omni, spot, directional, and ambient.
Supports soft “fill” lighting for radiosity-like visual effects.
SunBurn Pro, Community Games, and Studio’s deferred lighting supports hundreds of active lights
and a variety of lighting models for real-time soft and indirect lighting effects.
Shadows
Unified shadowing system handles all scene objects equally, allowing them to cast and receive
fully dynamic shadows onto other objects and themselves (self-shadowing).
Independent shadow rendering provides automatic shadows for custom/user-defined shaders without
writing any additional shader code. Shadowing system's modular design allows custom shadow
implementations. Built-in shadows support shadow mapping with level-of-detail (LOD) transitions.
Materials
Flexible built-in materials automatically apply to XNA models and custom objects. Wide range
of effects including: diffuse, bump, and specular mapping, as well as diffuse-color and skinning support.
Imports many material options directly from the modeling application. Allows real-time editing
of materials through the SunBurn editor, and modification outside of the editor using SunBurn material files.
SunBurn Pro, Community Games, and Studio offer advanced material effects including: parallax
mapping for creating incredible surface detail without additional geometry, emissive mapping
for adding glow and illumination effects, and color-specular mapping to simulate metallic and oily specular reflections.
Custom Materials
SunBurn Pro, Community Games, and Studio provide automatic support for custom, user-created
shaders using Direct3D's FX files and Standard Annotations and Semantics (SAS). Custom shader
properties are editable through both the SunBurn editor and material files. SunBurn provides automatic
built-in lighting, shadow, material (bump, specular, emissive, …),
and fog support to custom shaders without writing any additional shader code.
Post Processing and HDR
SunBurn Pro, Community Games, and Studio's post processing system allows creating custom
full-screen effects such as motion blur, night-vision, and more. Built-in High Dynamic Range (HDR)
processor provides bloom, tone mapping, dynamic scene exposure simulating how the human eye response
to light, and extremely high lighting detail without visually “washing-out” or “burning-out”.
Editor
Real-time editor offers complete in-game control over scene lighting, shadows, materials, and environment.
Built-in project manager allows artists to work entirely from the editor, never needing to open Visual Studio.
Windows-based interface provides a smoother and more familiar environment than engine-based editors.
Clean, artist-centric design is comfortable, efficient, and easy to use.
Art Pipeline
Artist-friendly pipeline provides support for modeling and texture applications compatible with XNA Game Studio
including: 3D Studio Max, Maya, XSI, Blender, Photoshop, Gimp, and many more. Natively supports popular
file formats including: Fbx, Direct X model (*.x), Jpeg, Tga, Png, Bmp, and more.
Imports many material options directly from the modeling application. Takes full advantage of the XNA content
pipeline offering access to both the standard Visual C# based pipeline, and the SunBurn editor (which can run without Visual C#).
Developer Hub
Centralized developer hub manages SunBurn projects, provides quick and easy access to developer resources,
documentation, examples, and more.
Helps keep you up-to-date with the latest community news, threads, and release information.
Architecture
Highly modular design ideal for both standalone use and integration into custom or existing games and engines.
Built-in scene, light, and shadow management objects handle processing behind-the-scenes for full lighting and
rendering support using simple XNA objects.
Access to lower-level objects such as material and shadow effects, shadow map, lights, and rending objects, for
use in custom rendering systems and integration into existing games and engines.
Development Resources
Includes Visual C# Starter Kits / project templates which show the most common integration techniques and
provide example assets. Access to “how-to” code examples, development forums, documentation, and community created resources.
SunBurn Pro, Community Games, and Studio offer access to bonus resources including source code and art assets
to many of the SunBurn demos, advanced example projects, and more.
Multi-Platform
SunBurn supports compatibility, development, and deployment on both Window XP and Vista.
SunBurn Pro, Community Games, and Studio offer complete compatibility across Windows XP, Vista, and Xbox 360
allowing SunBurn-based Windows games to run on Xbox 360 without porting any SunBurn code or assets.
