Understanding Light

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amit
In Life skills, Understanding Light

Improving as Lighting Artist

Learning to be a better Lighting Artist can be a daunting task. What seems to be an easy task to many quickly becomes a very complicated process. A lot of people think it is about placing out lights and then you are done. If you are a lighting artist you might sometimes get frustrated over how people simplify your speciality. That sounds like a good blog post for another time. Today, we are pointing out one or some of many things that helped me as a learned of Lighting for Lighting Artist.

Learning Style

First one must understand one self. I learn in a very different way than others, and in a different order of events. That is not to say I do not listen or take the advice seriously, I just know I need to learn in a certain pattern or method to truly make sense of things. This has frustrated people trying to help me in the past. They have a hard time understanding my process, thinking and why I am doing something. You might be told to learn photography, watch movies, do painting and learn the software to name a few things. It all depends on how you process information and apply it. Since I knew nothing it made it very hard to get started since my basic knowledge was below average, as I did not focus a lot on 3D Art to begin with. Not to mention I am a snowball learner. Snowball learner means I am super slow compare to others but eventually I catch up. And that is okay. You do you!

Mentors

I always look for mentors and I do not pay attention to persons age or title. You could be a Junior Lighting Artist or a Student. If I think you possess superior skills I will learn from you openly and gladly. Having this mindset has helped me a lot in learning and improving as lighting artist. I have also paid to check my knowledge up against experienced lighting artist through Game School Online where I had a mentor named Thomas Wright. This was very affordable and worth the investment. I have also paid a lot more to learn from CGMA and the tutor was Omar Gatica. I have also paid very little to explore from younger Lighting Artist but talented artist such as Florent Tunno who create courses and has a beginner tutorial at EXP Points. In the same community I also tried Maria Yue who is Senior Lighting Artist and talks about Lighting Theory. I sometimes go back to my own course for refreshment which combines most of the content anyone teaches online the way I understood it. It is 10 hours of Unreal Lighting going through Lighting Theory, Practical Lighting and more for a small price. By learning from others you will understand that lighting has many approaches, people know things you do not know and you will gain confidence because often these are known as talented, skilled or senior lighting artist. Arguably I might be doing this also due to my very high Imposter Syndrome.

Photography

It is useful to learn Photography as it will help both your eye, understanding of light, composition, framing and also technical understanding in the engine. Exposure anyone?

Movie Production

It can be useful to learn or do a short movie too. It will also teach you many relevant skills related to Photography but also you get a chance to learn lighting in a practical sense, colour grading, story telling with light and thought process that goes into creating a short movie.

Drawing

Learning to draw a little bit helped me also in terms of understanding framing, composition and traditional skills relevant to Lighting. Obviously, I did not become a master sketch artist but it trains your eyes which is very important. You need to understand shape and form which is relevant in Lighting.

Painting (Digital in my case)

Painting was probably the most useful boost in terms of improving my lighting due to the skills it improved for me. It improved my eyes, understanding of light, shading, reflection, shadows, shape, form, colour theory and is a traditional form of lighting.

Editing

The first thing I started with was actually filming myself and learning to edit. To get an understanding of camera and storytelling using cuts. This aided my understanding of light placement, thinking ahead and planning for cinematic lighting later.

Storytelling Lighting for Games

I also specifically created a horror prototype in Unity to learn the thought process, design and technical skills to do lighting in more than one game engine. This improves your technical skills, limitations, strength and put emphasis on what you need to learn technical to achieve your creative vision.

Apply your knowledge for someone else

I will often apply the knowledge in other peoples project. As this teaches you the challenges and difference in having full control over your creative outlet versus other peoples limitations, pipeline and designs. In my case I redid lighting for the game Intruder for Superboss games.

Visual Effects

It is helpful to do some visual effects as it teaches you post production, how lighting works with green screen and related skills to lighting.

Create learning content

Sometimes I will try and pass on knowledge that I learn to see if I understand it. And have someone who actually knows the software tell me if I am right, wrong or close. This is a humbling experience and certainly efficient way of eliminating uncertainty. However, this method is not for the faint hearted.

Color Grading

It is a good idea to learn color grading specifically as it helps improve your understanding of color theory, post processing and reading graphs. I found Davinci Resolve very useful in that context.

This is just a handful of methods, techniques and approaches I go through to push myself and my understanding. What are yours? Please share.

amit
In Breakdown, Understanding Light

Lighting/Level Design for The Caretaker

I originally did the lighting for this game in Unity around 2016, and it was terrible result back then but it was my first commercial stylized lighting. Since then the company has been wanting to port, expand and improve the game. I was therefore asked to relight it again, since I obviously improved a lot by then. And since then I had also learned to use Unreal Engine. So first I would like to show what I did in 2016 in Unity Engine.

Basic Progress Report

Unity 2016

Below is how it looked like for the Unreal Version when I got the project.

Unreal Early 2019

Below is the first draft where I figure out the placement, technical limitation and issues that can arise by placing out light sources with custom lighting setup.

Technical analytical round up until Mid 2019

Once I realized I needed more colour and a different level design to put it into practice, I was allowed to change the level design enough to improve the lighting even further. However, I needed to test out different colours in case I wanted fantasy fire.

Made higher openings on roof and expanded hallways a bit.

In the image above you can see I am trying to decide on the ratio of the light, the colours and expand the level design to support the vision.

Created elevation that went up in some key places

In the image above you can see that I thought straight corridor needed to be broken up a bit, so I added some dead end rooms that went up.

Kept the high ceilings in specific places around the level

In the images above you can also see I am avoiding skylight and instead opting in for manually adding bounce lights.

Tested the different lights and range

In the image above you can see I am checking exposure to get an idea of how dark I can push it, and how big the dark areas can be before it disrupts gameplay. I eventually got an idea of the base lighting, level design and mood I wanted so I started pushing it for the first dungeon. I also added vents and magical green glowing lights to walls. Below are some changes to the lighting on the last iteration.

High ceiling has blue light while ground has orange yellow
The range of the torches are limited to allow for dark transitions
Making sure that torch light bleeds out a bit in the darker area and allowing blue light to bleed into the torch light areas a bit.
Creating bright, dark and bright lighting flow to lead the player.
This is one way exit from top once you walk up. It is dark to be a bit unsafe.
This is one of the larger I put together and is also one of the brightest areas.
I created an area that went down to break up the patterns a bit.

So far the above images are for Dungeon 2 that could use some more work, so I will quickly show you images for Dungeon 1, where I established the guidelines. And also why I started adding elevations and brighter areas in Dungeon 2. Part of it is to keep player interest.

So, you can see the changes that has happen both in terms of level design and lighting. Where I also use fog to create the depth and mood needed. But let us explore a bit in detail why these choices are made and what are the limitations here.

Technical Limitations

Originally there were real time lighting on the torches, and they were placed pretty close to each other. That means it was very expensive. Too bright. And no bounce lights. To deal with this I created a default torchlight setup with a specific intensity and range, which I could tweak individually if needed.

You see two lights now doing the job.

Point light is set on static to create enough fill. The spot light is set on stationary to cast shadow when items are spawned randomly in front, and on the spiders climbing on top. Together they create the minimum I need for illumination around the torch areas. However, I had to carefully test and place those lights to avoid overlapping lights. As you might know the overlapping stationary lights become either real time or static (I forgot), when there are 4 of them overlapping. This resulted in a lot of work and thought on where to place the lights, and how to create the desired effect and mood. This also made everything too yellow, so I created a higher roof with exterior blue light coming in to balance things out.

I used rect stationary light and emissive box to create the blue lighting.

As you can see in the image above I created a larger ceiling and placed those near doors, corners or half way through the corridors to break up the yellow dominant light everywhere. This is expensive so I tried keeping it within a certain range. The reason for that is because for Dungeon 2 the areas are sometimes bigger, more corners and thus more likely to have overlapping lights coming through the wall. To counter this I reduced some of the ranges and added fake lighting. Whether I keep it is another test for another time.

Dungeon 2 has static lighting to help spread light further out.

As you see in the image above I have more static lighting in the bigger dungeon to deal with the stationary overlap limitations. And you can see I utilize it to push more light into the darker areas of the hallway, because I had to cut down the range for the lights.

This is the other side of the image above and its stationary light.

What does it mean? And why is this important? If I kept the original stationary light there would be around 6 overlapping lights thus forcing me to go either to real time or static. The other solution would be to move the lights around. So the solution for now was to add in fill lights manually.

This is stationary overlapping lights. Green is perfect.

As you can see I have manage to optimize the game cost by keeping the amount of real shadow being cast to minimum, and overlapping stationary light within green. As discussed earlier the seemingly innocent looking lighting job required some careful thoughts in optimization while developing the look for it. Further more I had to ensure that the real time cost around the map stayed out of red. We can see that using lightmap complexity view below.

Blue is super good, green is good and red is bad!

In the above image you can see red occurring due to it being close to the starting area, which has a big fire pit and particles.

Considering the amount of light in this room this is fairly optimized.
Similar to the first image but away from starting room.

As you can see the reason lights are placed the way they are, the level is designed the way it is and the thought that has to go into such a straightforward game is in fact a bit more complicated than simply dragging out lights. As for Lightma^p density I have kept it within green as seen below.

Lightmap Density

I hope this article showcase some of the important mindset and decisions that goes into lighting. Sometimes things might look straightforward and you might think you do not need a lighting specialist, but I improved the visual quality and frame rate using these methods.

amit
In Ubisoft Bordeaux, Understanding Light

Sub Roles of Lighting Artist at Ubisoft

Image used in featured image is by Cottonbro

In case you didn’t know there are sub specialist within the growing lighting artist career. That means they are often focused in one area of lighting such as game lighting, dialogue lighting or cinematic lighting. Each of these also has their own sub group but the person deals with it themselves, not another person in the other department. At least in Ubisoft case.

Game Lighting

Photo by Suludan Diliyaer

In Game Lighting you generally light the game based on where you put the light sources with emphasis on gameplay. You generally have to think about the optimization and frame rate more than the other lighting artist in the other areas. That often means you can’t have that nice reflection or shadow. It means you can’t have too many lights close to each other, or have their range overlap. I am simplifying the challenges but a lot goes into game lighting. Since I mostly do real time lighting with GI and 24/7 it makes things even more challenging. That means I need to check how the light affects everything throughout the whole day. It gets even more complicated if the player can shoot the lights, now I have to check what happens during less light.

Dialogue Lighting

Photo by Jonathon Borba

Dialogue Lighting comes in many phases and groups. In short it means the player is playing the game and entering a dialogue, those dialogues often have their own lighting. A common lighting is three point lighting. Since this occurs at specific events such as missions, it also happens during 24/7. In other words, you need to consider the light the game lighting artist put in, and the light dialogue put in. You then have to disable, add or adjust your own lighting to ensure the frame rate doesn’t drop but the characters are nicely lit. In my case the sub tools for this process is different than the main tools for Game Lighting. In other words, I use some unique editor and properties to do this type of lighting.

Cinematic Lighting

Photo by Elijah O’Donnell

Cinematic Lighting also comes with its own sub groups such as in game cinematic or recorded cinematic. In this case you would generally clean up the lighting from the game so you start blank and light up your own believable setup that works with the environment. Like all of the lighting roles here you generally keep track of optimization as mentioned during Game Lighting. However, in my case the fps can go lower and I would have more freedom to place out fake lights in comparison to Dialogue Light which might have 1-2, and game lighting which generally has 0 fake lighting. When I say fake lighting I mean additional lights. In this context for me anyway, we also use a different sub tool to handle this method of lighting.

Conclusion

I would say they all use principle of lighting, color, composition and storytelling but there are different restrictions and methods in doing so. So, having the basic non-technical knowledge about light, color, composition, framing, leading lines and storytelling can go a long way.

Do you want more?

amit
In Understanding Light

Understanding hard light versus soft light (Diffuse lighting)

Diffuse Light

When doing lighting it is important to understand what makes a diffuse light. In other words, knowing the difference between hard light and soft light is essential.

Hard light

What makes hard light different from soft light?

  1. Typically the shadow is very clear, not very soft or diffuse.
  2. It is clear where the light source is coming from.
  3. Hard light tend to bring out all the details. Therefore you often see diffuse lights being used to soften up portrait images.
  4. We often use hard light to bring mood and then use softer lights to brighten up the dramatic mood if needed.

Image by James Wheeler

Image by Ketan Kumawat

In real life and digital context, the type of lights that can produce hard lights are following:

  • Point light
  • Sun light
  • Spotlight far away
  • Area light far away (Commonly more used to soften scenes though)

What is important to keep in mind is that it is the scattering rays that defines what is hard or soft light. That means if the light rays have equal distance and they are parallel to each other, they will most likely create harsh shadows.

Original Image by Pixabay.

Soft Light

What makes soft light different from hard light?

  1. Soft light is the opposite of hard light. It can reach the point where the shadow itself is very bright and becomes very blurry. When that happens it is hard to separate the shadow from that actual bright area, that has no shadow.
  2. Generally the soft light comes from more than one area, often the sky or light bouncing off a surface. Therefore shadow in most context, is never completely black. This is because some light is coming from somewhere, that is diffuse light and fills in those areas.
  3. Portrait pictures, often of woman tend to use soft light. It avoids hard shadow and hides detail from the face. Personally, I don’t like soft light too much as it creates a flat image and from a creative point of view, it becomes boring to me. Generally, it is safe to use soft light for calm and pleasing feelings.

Image by Daniel Spase

Image by Bruno Cervera

In a real life and digital context typically you can create soft light effect by following methods:

  • Photographer soft box or transparent image plane in front of the light source.
  • Light passing through clouds, cloth or otherwise.
  • Generally large light sources can create diffuse light.
  • Light passing through something.
  • Light reflecting from a surface such as bounce light.
  • Area light is a big favourite for many when creating soft light digitally.
  • Sky light in the software such as skybox etc
  • Ambient light settings in digital software
  • Emissive texture/material

In contrast to hard light, diffuse light have scattered light that goes everywhere.

Original image by Nout Gouns.

I hope this article was useful, best of luck with your work.

amit
In Understanding Light

Shadow is as important as light

Shadow is as important as light

When working in lighting and using shadow it is a good idea to understand that all shadow are not the same. Depending on environment, light source and other light sources the shadow is different. You can in our case, digitally, be creative and have shadow tell a story. So did you ever look at a reference image and tried replicating the lighting, but for some reason something was off, maybe the shadows? This should help you to analyze and pick the right solution.

Cast Shadow

Cast Shadow are shadow created when light hits a form, and the form is next to surface that can cast the shadow.

Contact Shadow

This shadow is created is often the blurry shadow right beneath the object itself, it is how you know that an object is in contact with a surface.

Shadow Side

This side represents the darker side of an object. In lighting, all these shadows often receive fake lighting to make it more unique and realistic.


It is important to understand that shadow isn’t black and mostly receives some color or source of light. That is why we will add fill lights to it, to get the desired effect. So even though logically you might place out one light source, you should be doing more than that.

Shadow Size

Understanding shadow size is important as it allows you to understand what type of light, where to put it, which angle and distant to use. The most important thing to keep in mind is the angle of the light source. If the light is coming from above, the shadow is going to be very small. If the light is coming from further down, the shadow stretches out.

Another thing that factors in shadow size is the size of the light itself. A good rule is if the light source is smaller than the object, then the shadow is larger than the object. If the light source is bigger than the object, then the shadow is smaller. The reason for that is because if the light source is bigger, it casts more light and wraps around the object thus reducing the shadow size.

Lastly, the distance of the light will also affect the shadow size. This one however has a secondary thing to keep in mind as shown in the image above with the bear. The distance of the object receiving light and the surface casting the shadow also affects the size of the shadow.


So that is the basic you need to understand when lighting up your scenes in 3DS Max, Maya, Unreal, Unity or whatever really when looking at reference images.

That is it! Be sure to look at my previous blog or stop by my youtube channel.

Cheers

 

 

amit
In Understanding Light

Don’t forget the skybox (Lighting/Color)

Don’t forget the skybox

In many projects that I am part of I have noticed that people ignore the skybox, time of day and color of the sun when lighting their scene. More importantly, the skybox do not match any of the choices. So let us just quickly go through why picking the right skybox is important along with the sunlight settings. To understand that we need to look at some reference images and understand how light works.

If we look at the image below, it is brightly lit and you will see most of the colors that nature actually has, this is because the color of the sun is closer to white/yellow at this time, and the dark shadows under the tree shows generally the time of day and position of the sun.

If you look at the next image you will notice that nature has different value (saturation) but in general if the terrain is similar, it has the same colors. However, you might notice that depending on the time of day and sun position, the color yellow-orange pops up more. This effects the saturation, value and tone of the color despite it being somewhat similar in color if both were in the same time of day, sun position and so on.

So what does this mean? Well, to ensure you kind of understand the concept of how environment changes and that the skybox is a big reason for this. Let us turn these into greyscale. Look at them and continue reading after, and only after you notice the subtle difference.

So maybe you noticed that the value/strength of the colors are different even though they are for example green, yellow or blue. This has something to do with saturation and ton of other things, but our focus is to understand and assume that the sky affects the light in such a way, that the value of the color changes depending on the skybox. As the skybox aka sky creates ambience and fills in the environment with the color that is in the sky and of course, time of day. Below are both color swatches put in the same image, with a neutral grey background. Notice how two of the grey are almost gone (red arrows), and if you look hard enough you will notice that every circle overlaps another circle. This tells us that they are different in value. Even the darkest ones on top right, are different.

This is why skybox is important and picking the correct one for the correct time of day is also vitally important. Here are some examples to make sure you understand the difference. For this we are going to use Unity Engine to quickly end this blog post visually.

This is how many people do their light, even after changing the skybox, so what is wrong in this image in terms of skybox and lighting?

1.       The sky is clearly red/orange which means the time of day is either sunrise or sunset.

2.       The light source itself is white, when it should be yellow/orange.

3.       The direction of shadows and shading do not match but do notice the orange glow on the objects, coming from the skybox.

So let us look at the correct version if you light it correctly based on skybox, time of day and sunlight settings.

You can clearly see the brightest spot in the skybox is to the right, you see the time of day, you see the glow on the sphere, you see the shadows and color. Hopefully that gives you some insight on what you keep in mind when you light your next project.

A)      Skybox color, sunlight direction and time of day

B)      Direction of the sun source to create the correct shadows, in both intensity and length.

C)      The correct color depending on time of day, sky box and style.

I hope this was a quick and easy read, and useful. Be sure to read my previous post and stop by my channel at https://www.youtube.com/user/Cyberiusx

Cheers

Amit

 

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