If you didn’t already know I once had my own game company during the iPhone and appstore era, when it first started out. I researched the potential and was a bit early in creating games for a growing market I coined Busy Gamers. At the time of research the average age of gamers was 33 years old. People around age 38 bought most games and the emphasis was on casual gamers and woman at the time. What I wanted was to predict and stay ahead by slowly creating games for Busy Gamers with emphasis on cooperative games.
What are busy gamers? They are busy. They are 30+. They are in a relationship, married and have kids. They have limited time. They used to be hardcore gamers and are unsatisfied by games that take 100+ hours, with repetitive mechanic due to limited time but also experience in used game mechanics. Therefore they are increasingly interested in story but with great game mechanic, and some prefer slower paced games that are more tactical or strategic. Less twitch mechanic for some. These busy gamers would rather spend 20 dollars on 8-20 hours game than 60 dollars on 100+ hour game, because they know, by now they probably won’t finish past 20 hours.
Sounds familiar?
Today about 29% of gamers are below age of 35. Over 43% are over 35 years old. 20% are 36-49% and about 23% are in fact 50+ now. 67% of parents play with their kids once a week. 56% prefer multiplayer games.
Why is this important?
As stated earlier I recognized this trend 10+ years ago and now that I am nearing 35 years old I recognize I am a busy gamer myself now. I regularly converse with people around my age group, we talk about the type of games we want but cheaper and less hours. Although we struggle to find something that is still hardcore, complex, interesting, engaging, fun and all this within the budget and hours we have. We talk about the oversaturation of games and abundance of choice. In some cases we talk about our experience in playing games and how it affects our experience when we buy, play or put away a game. All this is important because it is still an untapped market.
Look around you
A lot of games have become multiplayer cooperative and it is increasing slowly. This is because it is also more profitable to keep players playing this way. You probably played a game that required some kind of cooperation against one other player, or against the AI. Think of dead by daylight, left 4 dead, evolved and many others that are popular today.
Start up
If I were to do another start up I would probably cater to age 35+ and create shorter deeper gaming experience for less price and shorter hours. Due to oversaturation and higher production value, it is also easier for someone new to develope those types of games, compare to an open world game, or even purely competitive multiplayer. It could even be a good strategy game. When I did it I was too early but it is the perfect time now.
So, if you are making a game for busy gamers remember their time is money, experience is value and they do want deep complex games…but in shorter time.
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.
Although this article uses game industry as an example, I think it works for most technical/artistic careers.
You know when you are doing exactly what you want, you are happy and content with your work? You know when things don’t get your way? You know when you have to do something completely different? You know when you just finished a project and there is a transition over to a new project, that can often take months?
During that period and series of event something happens to most of us. We go through psychological challenges. We are wondering if we should stay or move on. We might become negative and complain a lot. We might not see things in a very positive manner anymore.
It can also be that you want a raise, a promotion or feel things are unfair. For some it can be the long hours but in this case we are not talking about crunch time. Whatever it might be we all have or will go through this emotional and psychological challenge. And that is sometimes what breaks a person. It is sometimes what decides whether you are a professional or not in the game industry.
You might be thinking that the definition of professional game developer is if you work fulltime or released a game. Interestingly enough, some veteran will say it is not until you are laid off, go through these challenges and how you deal with it, that defines if you are a professional game developer.
Since I started a decade ago I have been part of many failed projects, companies and also seen people give up for whatever reason. We can argue that once you are in the game industry there are different types of professional game developers. You have the one going into the game industry, the ones who are in the game industry and the ones who “failed” and managed to get back up over and over.
That is where I have seen many fail, because they gave up. We can argue that is because we don’t really learn enough about mental aptitude, psychological strength and emotional control when we grow up. Especially during education, training or coaching. The focus has been technical skills in my experience.
So if you spend hours everyday just being technical or artistic, when are you training your body? Your mind? When are you learning to think? When are you making time to experience difficult things? How often do you purposely go into uncomfortable situation, or turn your life around knowing you might fail miserably? And how often did you rise up stronger, and kept trying things out?
If you do get in this situation remember that you are in control of yourself, and only yourself. Remember that only you can change yourself. Make an effort to learn what you can do better in non-technical areas. After all we are working as a team with other human beings. The technical part is mainly a way to create something, to express something and not the only thing that matters. And more importantly you should have a vision, plan or road map for yourself. No one is going to make one for you. Not your teacher. Not your parents. Not your mentor. Not your boss.
In short, we should all strive to improve our communication, reduce our assumptions and learn more about how we deal with failure, disagreement, conflict and unpleasant situation. In the long run, I believe that will decide who falls and rises to the top. Whatever that top is for you.
Almost two weeks ago I left everything behind in Norway to try something different. That resulted in moving to France. During the last few months, I have been doing some freelancing to afford the initial cost that I am going through.
Unfortunately, most of the projects I work on can’t be talked about but since some of them are finishing slowly it is becoming easier to talk about the different types of projects I have been working on.
One of those unique projects is called Get It Right Training which I have taken part in. It is essentially a digital training game for trainers to train the officials. In other words, they can watch a play and learn the rules and safety of the game.
I mostly was included to spice up the visual, optimize and improve the overall quality of the game.
Here is a video explaining and showing some of the technology.
As you might or might not know, I do quite a lot of freelancing. The drawback of my type of freelancing is I don’t get any direct credit or allowed to talk about it.
However, today I can briefly mention a project I was part of which is about designing your own playground. For example, for a kinder garden, local park or something around those lines.
The project is still an ongoing project thought but the type of projects I am taking part in, and learning more from are not directly games for entertainment.
So you can start with a predefined design if you like similar to this image here:
Pre-Designed Sets
After clicking it you can then edit it with different props, depending on connection points and other settings that define what you can and can’t do.
Basic Set
As you click around the green dots you can choose the appropriate props to add.
Choices for the green selection dot
And you can keep adding, editing, moving them around and rotate around to view the potential masterpiece. This can then be ordered and created for real-life playgrounds.
This time I went for general inspiration and I ended up with
these two images. What you will notice is that they do not reflect the final
lighting. This is because I used the grayscale and general idea of it, rather
than copying it.
Image from the book mentioned on the image above.Photo by: Sheng-Wei Wang
Turning inspiration to BW
Turning Inspiration to Opposite Color
Setting up Basic Lighting
I then set up the basic lighting in which we want as few
light as possible to maximize the effect, range and intensity. I also wanted
the middle light to have the blue and strongest light intensity. And the outer
areas to have a orange weaker light to them.
Tweaking Shadow
I didn’t want my usual sharp shadows. I wanted them a bit
more diffused so I adjusted the source radius on all.
Key Light as Area Light
I used area light for the key light to get diffused shadow
but also a nice soft effect overall to the scene.
Reflections
I tweaked the reflections to get the desired reflection out
of the whole area, including ground. For the ground I use planar reflection.
Skylight
I didn’t want too much bright light coming in from skylight,
so I kept it to the minimum using the cubemap.
Fog
I then added some orange fog to emphasize the mood and spread
the light around a bit.
Key light Color Test
It was important to get the basic color right, intensity and
range of the key light. Which as mentioned earlier was an area light.
Camera Angle
I started tweaking the camera angle to decide the
composition, depth of field and other features.
Post Process
During all this I also tweaked the post process to pump up
the desired effect.
Light complexity
These days I like to check the light complexity to optimize
the scene a bit. This is why there are so few lights on this scene.
Lightmap Density
I also bumped up the lightmap density to get more out of the
quality, but not too high.
GPU Visualizer
And to ensure the optimization is at its best I check the
GPU Visualizer. I try my best to keep the numbers low which means the ms cost
and fps is optimized.
The first
thing I did was look for general references that could work for me. And after
that I decided to create a colour palette that I think might be interesting to
do. This scene is popular to light, so I wanted to use colours that were less
popular. For that reason, I went with teal, purple and yellow/orange.
Color Wheel
Greyscale Lighting
Grey Scale
My
preferred way of lighting is to get the greyscale the way I want it. So I focus
on where the light should come from, where is it hitting and generally ensuring
that the values from light to dark is clear.
Deciding on Color
Once I have an idea I go back and forth deciding where the color should be
for what, its intensity and range.
Lighting Color Mode
Shadows
As the process continues I start looking at the darkness and which method
to use to remove complete blackness when viewed with materials on.
Lighting With Material
Post Processing
Post Processed
For this particular scene I decided to lean on stationary light a bit, and
use post processing volume to bring out the light using exposure and global
illumination.
IES Profile
I would adjust the IES profile to get the desired effect, which meant
changing intensity and range to deal with the changes that came with using IES
profile.
IES Profile
Shadow Length/Shadow Bias
Certain
stationary lights where not giving contact shadow and it took me some time to
realize I had to adjust Contact Shadow Length. For the movable lights I
adjusted Shadow Bias.
Contact Shadow Length
Detail Lights
For the few
detail lights I prefer using movable lights, and those tend to be added to a
different lighting channel to save resources. Additionally, I will turn off
shadow if possible. This makes moveable much cheaper to use.
Moveable Lights
Window Material
To get the
desired look for the window, I changed the map and overall settings to get the
look.
Window Material
Reflection Probes
Eventually
I added reflection probes to see if I wanted to make any changes or adjustments.
Reflective Surface
Summary
Naturally
during the process I added dirt mask, bloom, colour correction and tweaked the
lights into I got it just right.
Doing game lighting compare to cinematic poses some other challenges, unless you are doing real-time cinematic that is. I am specifically talking about performance, gameplay, and clarity to name a few. In this blog post, I will break down a test lighting I did for a game jam 2D Side scroller with a sci-fi theme to it. The majority of the level was put together by my friend with some adjustment made by me later on. So let us start with the general workflow, starting with References.
References – Color and Mood
The first thing to do is always get some references, it makes it much easier to establish your mood and lighting setup. Let me provide two samples from the reference library that I used to light the area.
Star Citizen – Mood and Color SchemeHalo 4 – Mood and Color Scheme
Once I spend a few hours doing this process I try and establish my own color scheme based on my references, this ensures creative freedom, expression and artistic decisions suitable for the particular game you might do lighting for. Provided is a sample of said color scheme that was used to light up the level.
Base Color Scheme – Oversaturated in comparison to references
Light Placements
With the concept, planning and reference phase semi-completed I recommend thinking about where to put the lights, as in my case there are suggestions on light sources but in some cases none at all. So an example of how it would look like is this:
Notice no physical light sources
Looking at the environment I started playing around with different light placement but ended up placing lights somewhat like this:
Light Source Placements
The reason for these placement was to have the flexibility of creating shadow through barrels and beams. There are additional light sources behind on the yellow wall, to create light in the background. All of this together gives enough light sources to create specular, reflection, highlight, shadow and overall dark background. This is because majority of the light is around the playable area, thus the background will become darker.
By now, maybe you noticed the color of the materials. This plays an important role in what color light to pick. In this case, I was the one who changed the materials to yellow and red, to emphasize the blue/teal lighting that would go in the playable path. With minor breakups using red/orange.
I continued adding static mesh light sources down the hallway, in the process I added elevation and other details to adjust the level design. The darker red light was added to the door entrance with a big wall in between, and other light sources where given a blue teal color. I added similar light sources behind camera to ensure it wasn’t too dark on either side.
Adding the light to the level
One of the first thing that is good to do is getting a decent emissive from the materials that are on the static mesh light sources itself. This will give out a light that can be baked into the texture, saving real time resources.
Emissive lighting turned on
Then a lot of time goes into adding the best suitable type of light type, such as spotlight or point light to light up the area as intended. In this particular case a mixed method was used to create the lighting. Another mixed method was used called static, stationary and dynamic lighting. Static being the cheapest, stationary mid expensive and dynamic the most expensive. The biggest difference is that static is pre-calculated onto the texture and won’t cast shadow if something moves in between later. While Dynamic happens per second and will cast shadow if something comes in between.
All of these are using spotlight with their own range, intensity and color.All of these are point lights with their own radius to brighten up darker areas.These are detail point lights. It means they are unique in color or have a distinct purpose on creating detail lights due to their souce. In this case computer screen and devices etc.
All of these lights have unique settings to them for different purpose and reasons. I will try and explain some of the principles behind it. In general only the important lights have dynamic shadow on which means it is calculated every second while the game runs, everything else is baked to save on resources during gameplay. This allows me to be slightly free in using extra lights in areas that I need to in exchange for longer baking time/rendering.
These spotlights are one of the main light sources, known as key light. That is why their intensity is brighter to show the clear path of direction for the player. The two cones evens out the intensity and gentle fades out the hotspots. This is also a dynamic light and cast real time shadow during gameplay.The second main light source is also a spot light with a wide range to cast shadow far enough as the player moves. It’s color however is on the opposite color wheel which is red. This was to breakup the monotone color scheme. Notice the light on the top wall is same type, but set to static as it doesn’t need to be dynamic real time. Optimisation and illusion is key.These points lights all have different range, intensity and color but their purpose is to fill in darker areas and spread out the original light source by faking it. Because of this their shadow is turned off some places to reduce render/baking time and set to stationary to avoid real time cost. The yellow radius is radius representing light source size, in this case faking the fluroscent light source in the gateway everywhere. It affects the ground also.Notice the ground. This is manipulated through the source radius settings mentioned above.
As shown so far there are many things, thoughts and techniques used to prepare the lighting of the level. From this part on I copy pasted the lights to the rest of the level. That is why color palette, lighting position and most of the work is done early so rest of the level would go quicker. However, since each section is different some tweaks are still required.
An example of such a scenario would be the image shown later below which has hotspot created due the static mesh being closer than other objects earlier when creating the lighting setting. These lights also have something called IES Profile which is physically accurate light patterns from real life. To save time I took an image from Atul Dravid.
The lights being used for the game level is also using Inverse Square Law which is basically how lights fall off and lose’s intensity over distance as shown above. But I took another image to save time, this time from Johannes Daunner to show a quick example.
This is when we can turn off the Inverse Square Law and play around with intensity, range and light falloff exponent. In my case I also adjusted the point light to add intensity to the floor to closer match the other areas.
Notice the details of the mataerials and objects are easier to spot, such as the white line on top of the machine which would otherwise be hidden.
Basically you keep going like this looking at your reference, color palette and adjusting it based on values, contrast and what you are going for. I tried making sure the background was visible enough while the main path was brightest. Smallest thoughts went into it such as purposely having white tiles on the path and black on both sides of it, this creates contrast and also ensure brightest spots are in the middle of the path.
Fog
I won’t go too much into detail but when you add fog into the scene such as Exponential Height Fog you need to remember it creates flatness due to the type of technology it is. Some time was spent to push the fog to the middle of the scene rather than the whole scene, this was to ensure depth without losing value and contrast. Additionally fog sheet was used to put around on the side background to create further depth and mood. The light sources closer to the player area and higher up was given volumetric lighting as well.
The distant fog was kept to this area while the volumetric fog light was kept closer and up in the air. This was to create further depth to the scene, which often can go wrong and make it more flat.
Post Processing
Eventually I wanted a more worn down color saturation, in other words desaturated color scheme. For this the Post Processing Volume was used by adjusting tone mapping, chromatic Abberation, Bloom, Ambient Occlusion and custom LUT was created in Photoshop. A LUT is basically color correction.
Post Processing allows us to adjust the mood, contrast and ambient occlusion to our intended mood and feeling.
Final Touches
For the final touches you keep iterating upon color, intensity, value and depth. You add in some more details and reflections. You go into Light Mass Settings to adjust the light baking quality, you pump it all up to max and you look for compositional shots to promote your work.
I hope you learned something. Feel free to share, like or contact me. Easiest method is to contact me on linkedin or artstation.
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?
Typically the shadow is very clear, not very soft or diffuse.
It is clear where the light source is coming from.
Hard light tend to bring out all the details. Therefore you often see diffuse lights being used to soften up portrait images.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Image by James Wheeler
Image by Ketan Kumawat
Original Image by Pixabay.
Soft Light
Image by Daniel Spase
Image by Bruno Cervera
Original image by Nout Gouns.
I hope this article was useful, best of luck with your work.