Lighting Process & Workflow Tips
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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
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
Replies
Simply put: Your blog is awesome. Informative and funny. 4 monkies smoking cigars out of 4.
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:
@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...:)
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