Steve, no rim lighting please.

[auxy]

Character rim lighting is the cancer of video game graphics. Please do not include this effect in Warframe.

[Podge]

after looking up what rim lighting actually is, i dont think its really that bad if it's done well, but please at least make it optional, because my pc isnt very good.

[QueenKharn]

Rim lighting is a natural phenomenon and looks good when used properly. I'd like to see if ingame at some point for sure. Imagine the War Within intro with people rim lit by the strong backlight there.

[(PSN)Hooligonzo]

People describing things as the cancer of things is the cancer of things.

[auxy]

For those who aren't sure, here's a demonstration of rim lighting from Fallout 4.

Spoiler

The weird, unnatural lighting around characters is rim lighting. (If you're playing Fallout 4 and want to disable it, enter "cl off" in the console.)

Now, admittedly Bethesda's implementation is disgustingly incompetent, but even when done well it's still wrong. Look here at this Wolfire games blog post. Note that, as one of the commentors astutely points out, the bunny's tail is lit when it should be in complete shadow.

This is just the nature of the beast, because so-called "rim lighting" is not actually simulating anything. Rim lighting is a gruesome hack, an abstraction to accommodate for the lack of real light bounce calculations (ray-tracing) in the scene. Sure, you could say the same of most lighting hacks -- ambient occlusion, really any screen-space effect -- but in this case it looks visibly wrong.

Some people (like me) are extremely sensitive to when lighting hacks look incorrect, and this one stands out particularly. I hope the new renderer doesn't include this effect, or at least allows us to turn it off.