Dynamic Environment Lighting in Sky: Children of the Light #gdcrewind #gdc2026 #gaming

A GDC talk excerpt covering how Sky: Children of the Light implements dynamic environment lighting using a CPU-based ray-traced cube map centered on the player. The approach allows smooth transitions between dark and bright environments without taxing the GPU, by updating only 10-20% of samples per frame and blending over time. The resulting low-res probe is filtered across MIP levels for different roughness values, enabling physically-based reflections, ambient lighting, and subsurface lighting calculations.