Article: Game Lighting Examples

[israelyang]

thanksfor taking the time to share. the game looks great, great environment. Nice lighting, I personally prefer more contrast but I understand why it can be undesirable for a game

[Leotril]

Hey Cybergooch ..
Thank u for the tutorial it was really entertaining watching now latee at nigth amazing job on the lightining of course .. :scream:
im curios about the rendering of the light maps Gi radiosity illumiation what render did u use for that ? i read that you use maya placing the lights and stuff did u use maya on the rendering ?

cheers

[Cybergooch]

thanksfor taking the time to share. the game looks great, great environment. Nice lighting, I personally prefer more contrast but I understand why it can be undesirable for a game

Thanks...yeah, I agree with you on the contrast. For some reason there seems to be more contrast ingame than there is in those shots.

[Cybergooch]

Hey Cybergooch ..
Thank u for the tutorial it was really entertaining watching now latee at nigth amazing job on the lightining of course .. :scream:
im curios about the rendering of the light maps Gi radiosity illumiation what render did u use for that ? i read that you use maya placing the lights and stuff did u use maya on the rendering ?

cheers

Thanks, glad you liked it. We used mental ray, in conjunction with some proprietary tools for converting the lightmaps into a format they wanted.

[EricChadwick]

This is a great article, thanks for putting it together!

I don't understand the lightmap on page 4. Why is yellow used for dark areas, and red/blue for light areas?

Is it being used as a form of normalmapping, like yellow is specifying a negative normal? Cool idea actually if so, since I guess you get directional light data from the lightmap, so the bump normalmaps can be directionally lit by the lightmap.

Still reading through it...

[bjorke]

Pretty sweet and a lot of work for a small team!

I'm unsure if it will ever appear on the web, but last week at Gamefest, Otavio Good of Secret Level described their lighting pipeline and the fact that they are able to get huge turnaround gains for lightmap generation by using the GPU to do the work (sky map? Just use 100 real-time lights....) -- that's a GPU for the build, not for the final run-time lighting. SO they could regenerate all the lightmaps for an entire 16km x 16km level in "Iron Man" in under an hour (assuming, say, about 1000 different meshes in the level).

Lightmaps will never go away. Even with uber realtime shading, there's no need to be lighting the insides of people's nostrils and socks! :)

[EricChadwick]

Kevin, are papers/slides from Gamefest available anywhere? Anything available for your Play It Forever talk?

[Matroskin]

thanks a lot Cybergooch, great idea to share this article with us :thumbsup:
I am strarting to learn level art seriously. I appreciate the time u have spent on it, it will be useful indeed.

[Cybergooch]

This is a great article, thanks for putting it together!

I don't understand the lightmap on page 4. Why is yellow used for dark areas, and red/blue for light areas?

Is it being used as a form of normalmapping, like yellow is specifying a negative normal? Cool idea actually if so, since I guess you get directional light data from the lightmap, so the bump normalmaps can be directionally lit by the lightmap.

Still reading through it...

You know, I'm not even sure why the lightmaps use that color scheme. I guess the programmers have their reasons...but I couldn't tell you what they are. :)

[bjorke]

Kevin, are papers/slides from Gamefest available anywhere? Anything available for your Play It Forever talk?Slides for all or most talks should be on the Gamefest website -- I know that MS was going to put vids of some of their talks up on "Channel 9" as well.

I recorded my talk, and will be (manually, alas) transcribing it to a PDF form for distribution on our web site developer.nvidia.com too.

Or, you could come to CEDEC in Tokyo on the 26th to see me give (a shortened version of) it again :)

[mister3d]

Thank you for sharing the experience. Your lighting is very natural and works well. From recent games I was stunned with "FEAR" lighting, especially with dynamic lighting and "patterned" fixtures, which looked very fresh with creating those patterns on walls.
It must be really cool to work as a lighting artist - so huge experience (I'm envious :) ). Looks like the resoluton of lightmaps was quite limited, PS3 has only 256 mb of ram, right? But it's so different from PS2 with it's 64 mb, it I remember correctly 8). I can't judge only about the lighting, overall it looks very cool game, you must be proud to have this in your portfolio. I can see realtime raytraced shadows from flashlight of the main hero - the PS3 looks quite capable! How about using IES lights, was it possible? Those create so nice patterns(maybe the resolution of lightmaps didn't allow it).
Was the cheating the last resort od you used it a lot?
"There were literally thousands of objects, and when the whole area was loaded I got about 1 fps in the editor." - that's funny. Why in the editor the speed is much slower than in gameplay?
Did you use lighting shaders for lights, did you have any problems with overburn lighting with mr?
"I always liked the way this area came out...very moody. I used area lights at the windows." In this image I can't see sshadows that must be present because of the column that is between the 2 windows. Why is that?
"One of the lighting goals in a game like Resistance is to create areas that will give the player a feeling that something around the next corner is going to try to bite their face off." Lol, the phrase is funny.
" The above shot is a good example of what a difference lighting can make for the creepiness factor. Imagine playing the game in the non-lit version, and how very not-scary that would be." Hmm, let's remember early games like HL(but maybe they used lightmaps too). Nevertheless, the game was scary(for that time). Without textures it's really scary btw :eek: .
"You've got more freedom when lighting indoor areas of course...you can decide on the light fixtures themselves, which will dictate the type of lighting in that area, and what will be lit or not lit. In the above shot, a single fluorescent light gives an ominous look to this room."" - this image imho looks a bit underexposed, not enough bounce light, too dark to see anything.
"So when a level is assigned to me for lighting, I'll look at the concept sketches for the level and do a preliminary lighting pass, just to set the brightness, contrast, and color for the level." Is it procedural color without textures, basic geometry and draft lighting for fast approximation of the final result?

[Cybergooch]

...Or, you could come to CEDEC in Tokyo on the 26th to see me give (a shortened version of) it again :)

Sounds great! I don't suppose you have any extra tickets to Tokyo lying around do you? :scream:

As for NVIDIA, I am happy to report that with the latest drivers, I am able to get both NVIDIA cards in my windows vista 64 bit system working, allowing me to display on 3 monitors. Hurray!

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