Lighting Process & Workflow Tips

Endfinity Jon

I'm never really sure where to post write-ups. Either way, I've just uploaded a new blog post about lighting. I've tried to outline my thought process as well as workflow steps I take to get from concept to completion. Lighting's a tough thing to articulate but I wanted to document some broad thoughts I had to hopefully help people out who struggle with it. Check it out:

http://jcricreate.blogspot.com/ (Article is the first one)

Hopefully my picture to word ratio is getting better, I tend to write novels.



Let me know if you have any questions or general comments. I'd love to discuss the topic further!

Love,
Jon

J0NNYquid

Really great post! Your critique really helped me out on my most recent portfolio piece, this is really well done, and very helpful.

artquest

Very nice post! I learned quite a bit and I have to say I love your work

onionhead_o

thanks for sharing.

Clark Coots

fantastic, love your other tutorials as well!

Endfinity Jon

Right on! Very happy you all are getting some use out of it! It's hard to tell whether or not people are reading sometimes so it's refreshing to know that my writing is getting viewed. Thanks for the comments again, I appreciate them.

Jessica Dinh

Awesome! Lighting is one of my weak points, so this is gonna be really helpful. Looks like you have other tuts too! Hehehehe xD Much thanks for sharing your insights.

BARDLER

That is an awesome right up, thanks a lot. What helps me sometimes is to take a screenshot of my work in progress and do some simple paint overs and adjustments in photoshop. It helps me visualize the look I want for me scene a lot more than what I am thinking in my head.

Jeff Parrott

Great job Jon! Like the walkthrough. It's nice seeing other people's thought process on lighting. Glad to see you're focusing on that role.

Synyster

Awesome stuff! Thank you for showing your process. It really helps a lot!

Ootrick

LOL one of the best posts I've seen for a while. I'll be following you much closer mr Criner... So close you could almost smell me.

Simply put: Your blog is awesome. Informative and funny. 4 monkies smoking cigars out of 4.

leleuxart

I haven't read it all yet, but it looks like a great read. Thanks for writing it up.

Quick question, how expensive is lighting when it comes to the final scene? I don't mean build times, but I always thought lighting and post-process were some of the major memory hogs. Would you add the extra point lights everywhere that needed it or keep it limited to important areas?

I love the lighting with the Naughty Dog pieces. :thumbup:

Endfinity Jon

Thanks errbody! I started writing this blog at the top of the year to try to put myself out into the community a bit and I'm really excited by your comments.

@leleuxart - That's a good question and it really depends. Ideally, the lighting team should stake their claim early in the project so budgets are noted and accounted for. On Amalur, we didn't start thinking about lighting until a bit later in the project and we ended up not having the wiggle room we wanted. We used 16x16 textures to create out skyboxes. You read that right, we used a special compression that would smooth the pixels and make it look wonderfully rich and not pixelated. Left to right would denote 0-24:00 (day/night cycle) and bottom to top would be horizon to apex.

On my current project, we're at the end of the pipe so, again, we don't have a ton of breathing room. If there's real time reflections or animated environment elements, our back is against a wall from the start. Important things here are making sure you don't have a lot of overlapping lights. That's huge in frametime, same with shadow casters and making sure they're used where they'll matter. I use volumes to turn off lights once you leave a space and other glamourous (but necessary) optimization tricks. Currently, I RARELY use point lights. I'm not a huge fan of them as most light sources aren't omni directional (and they have the biggest influence on light overlap). Both studios also have/had tube/line lights which are a great way to accent surfaces which I'm not sure Unreal currently has. Another trick, that I plan to show off once the project ships, is the use of a negative light. I use negative lights to ground assets in an area where I couldn't otherwise afford a shadow or want to accentuate additional depth.

@Ootrick - Thanks! I think...:)

leleuxart

Endfinity Jon wrote: »

On my current project, we're at the end of the pipe so, again, we don't have a ton of breathing room. If there's real time reflections or animated environment elements, our back is against a wall from the start. Important things here are making sure you don't have a lot of overlapping lights. That's huge in frametime, same with shadow casters and making sure they're used where they'll matter. I use volumes to turn off lights once you leave a space and other glamourous (but necessary) optimization tricks. Currently, I RARELY use point lights. I'm not a huge fan of them as most light sources aren't omni directional (and they have the biggest influence on light overlap). Both studios also have/had tube/line lights which are a great way to accent surfaces which I'm not sure Unreal currently has. Another trick, that I plan to show off once the project ships, is the use of a negative light. I use negative lights to ground assets in an area where I couldn't otherwise afford a shadow or want to accentuate additional depth.

Hmm, I didn't think about the overlapping. I think you're right about the line lights, Unreal only has point lights, spotlight, sky lights, and the directional light. I tried making my own line light with the "use emissive for static lighting" and it doesn't seem to work haha. I guess it basically emits like a point light(until UE4?...). The negative light sounds really interesting, look forward to seeing it