Lighting (1st August)

During the last week my focus has been on lighting. I have been working with one of the art tutors who was really helpful, taking me through the benefits of all the different types of lighting. The most important changes that we made was to the interior lighting e.g. candles and lamps etc, where we changed the lighting mobility/type from movable to stationary and saw a huge improvement in both the lighting quality and performance of the game after this change. The most important thing that I took away from these meetings though, was understand the difference between the two light types and where in which situations they should be used.

Using stationary lighting was really helpful and definitely made me think more carefully about my light sources, I saw the limitation of only being able to have 3 sources of light in close proximity to each other as a tool more then a hinderance as it made me analyse my scenes more carefully.

Before lighting pass

After Lighting Pass

Above is a before and after of introducing proper lighting techniques and finishing my lighting pass. Its black and white the difference between the two images and you can see how I creatively used the light in a way to help drive the environmental story telling of the game, for example using the mines old abandoned mine carts as a means of guiding the player through the level and using their light to light the scene. Additionally, I have added flash lights on both the players weapon and some enemies weapons for the second level, this makes the caves feel more realistic due to their dark interior and the lights on the enemies weapons allows for the player to more easily find the enemies (Due to their dark clothes it would make it hard to spot the enemies).

I also learnt the importance of angles when it comes to lighting and the power that it has to transform a scene, for instance in the images below (images of main antagonists house in first level )you can see the light come through the windows which changed the initial dark interior of the house of into something that looked more realistic for the scene that it was in.

The biggest issue that I was having with lighting was when I built the game, the lighting in the third level would cause the materials on the enemy AI to turn white (as seen below). Additionally, the interior elements of the castle would be way too dark and it was pleasant to look at.

Both of these elements completely took the player out of the game, so I needed to come up with a solution. In the end the solution turned out to be quite simple, with it simply being changing the source type of the skylight in the scene, This saw huge improvements to the lighting, fixing both the lighting for the interior elements and the material issues on the enemy player models.

Overall during this project and especially this week, I have learnt loads about lighting and the power it has to transform a scene. I now appreciate how proper lighting techniques can be used to take the quality of my environments to the next level.

#Gam705MajorProject