RDR2 Interior Lighting Tool

In early 2024 I joined the WildRP team - who are creating a custom roleplaying server in Red Dead Redemption 2 using RedM.

A large on-going problem with RDR2 modding was that nobody had solved the problem of lighting in custom interiors yet, in the 4 years that the game had been modded - reflections were missing and ambient lighting was entirely flat.

Upon joining the team, I did some research by looking through files, Rockstar patents, and rendering breakdowns, and figured out how the interior lighting system in the game worked. Using that information I created a tool to generate lighting data for our custom interior meshes - giving them the ability to blend in with the base game assets to a much greater extent.

I used the Godot game engine to create the tool due to its ease of use for rapid prototyping, especially when it comes to user interface tooling.

The tool is open source and available on GitHub.

Before and after of a custom church interior