What's lighting for games like?

#1

Hi! I have experience lighting animations. But I was wondering how lighting for video games is like?
Anybody can share the experience? Thank you.

-D
Demoreel: http://vimeo.com/22660290

#2

Depending on the game you are working on, they have their own set of challenges and restrictions. You are either going to be working with a lightmap or a differed lighting pipeline.

Lightmaps have issues with resolution and managing UV sets to produce quality. Differed systems have GPU limitations.

Either way, when lighting for gaming, you’re faced with the challenge of making the environment presentable from all camera angles, not just a fixed position like you do in TV and Film. You are also tasked with lighting for gameplay and driving the users focus and direction.

As technology in the field continues to increase, so does the quality of art produced. Limitations are becoming less and less every year.

#3

Thanks for the information!

Do people work on lighting in Maya or those similar 3D applications?

#4

Depends on where you work. I’ve worked with Maya and 3D Studio Max for game productions.

In both cases though, the 3D application was mearly used for placement of lights and the atributes were controlled by some form of proprietary software.

#5

Interesting information.

Thanks, LowJacK.

#6

I used to work a lot in Unreal Editor 3, and we would use UE’s built-in lighting solutions. At first it was a lot of fake solutions – adding point lights to act like bounced light, that kind of thing. Eventually we started baking in some Global Illumination solutions inside the engine. Very pretty, but very slow to bake if you’re on slow machines like we were.

That’s only half of the equation, though… Reflective surfaces require a completely different approach to lighting, and lights always require shadows – still one of the trickier things in game engines. They’re getting better all the time, but I still haven’t seen an example yet of dynamic shadowing that really looks good.

#7

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