Lighting Artist?

Ark

Anyone have any info on what this job entails and how technical oriented the job is. I suppose this falls under an environment artist job at smaller studios, but the bigger studios seem to have this as a dedicated job title.

Any dedicated lighting artist here that could give a rundown of a typical days work, that would be great.

haiddasalami

A nice read from one of the lighting artists at Insomniac.

http://cybergooch.com/tutorials/pages/lighting_rfom1.htm

Ark

Thanks, i'll take a look at that later.

PixelMasher

that article is an awesome read, really full of great info for anyone interested in in-game lighting. Studying composition and photography will really help your lighting skills too, composition and lighting pretty much go hand in hand.

Autocon

Another good place to look is on different company websites if they have lighting artist positions open at the time as they will have all the requirements you will need to do the job and what they expect of you.

urgrund

Ark wrote: »

...and how technical oriented the job is.

It would depend - for example, if your game is vertex baked (say, you just baked Radiosity in 3dsMax) then your work has a constant performance/memory implication in game... for example, the memory footprint will be exactly the same and the performance/fillrate will be exactly the same no matter how you adjust or setup your lighting rigs - in that case it's a relaxing journey to the finish line

Up the quality to the next static level and you'll have baked lightmaps (2D texture pages) - so now, from a technical point of view, you still generally have constant performance (ie. you can add a zillion lights and when they are baked, the performance will be exactly the same as 1 light) but now you need to consider that you are creating many more 2D assets that need to be stored on disk, loaded in memory at run-time and sampled in shaders... so this means you'll need to check the memory usage of your lighting, but can be pretty safe with the performance.


...if you're using engines that rely heavily, or exclusively, on dynamic lights then you're up against a different beast. You will need technical knowledge, to a degree, of how the engine you're using handles lights as adding just 1 extra light with a radius just big enough may mean several objects have to be re-rendered in realtime and could throw your performance over budget! ...so you will need a general understanding of how to profile your work on the target platforms and usually the engine provides some tools for this such as seeing how many lights are currently effecting a certain object - masking Object/Light groups ...etc

So in this case, lighting almost becomes a "puzzle" where you're trying to get the look you want whilst staying under performance budgets.


Either way - every studio and every engine decide on different methods of attack (technically & aesthetically) for lighting, so you best bet is to just fire up a few different engines and play with lighting... 2 that come to mind are Crysis (100% dynamic, rely on post-effects for further lighting) & Unreal3 (baked directional lightmapping & dynamic)...


Hope that helps!

Ark

Sorry to bump this old thread, but i figured it was easier to elaborate in this thread.

I've been studying a lot recently, mainly lighting/rendering book, colour theory and photography books and this area really interests me.

If anyone has any knowledge on how companies hire for these positions it would be greatly appreciated.

I mean is it enough to have basic lit scenes with good composition, colour script and post-process effects, or do they want fully-fledged environmental scenes with the above?