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LIGHTING
INTRODUCTION
Lighting is one of the most important and influential elements in environments. It has the power to make or break the visuals, theme, and atmosphere. Even the most simplistic level can still be brought up to a high level of quality with nothing more than lighting. Likewise, even the most awesome architecture can look horrible if it is badly lit. Lighting is often forgotten and underestimated. Designers often add it quickly and without much love. While in the past this was partially excusable by the weak hardware and game engines, these excuses just don’t hold up anymore. Lighting is just as important as geometry. Without lighting there is no environment but just groups of three-dimensional objects. Lighting has the power to communicate the atmosphere to the player; for example scary or happy. Lighting has the capacity to bring life to a group of objects and bring them to the next level of quality. Its purpose has expended further than just giving the players the ability to see where they are going. It creates and enhances the ambience. Lighting can make places look scary/cozy or cold/warm. It augments the three-dimensional feel of objects, creates composition and balance to lead the player’s eyes around. Yet, despite all of this, there are still a very large group of games and levels out there which use nothing more than white ambient light everywhere.
THE SOURCE
The most basic rule of lighting is that it always needs a light source. It is impossible to have lighting in an area with no source, as in this bad example.While there is plenty of lighting in this corridor it’s impossible to tell where the light is coming from. This completely breaks the illusion and looks artificial.The opposite can also be true and is also bad. There could be light source in a level but no light coming from it, which is the second rule. A common mistake is to add lava in an environment without adding any lights nearby. Lava is molten rock and fire, both give off light. Thus lava should emit red or orange lighting. This is also true for any other type of light source such as a regular fire, the vehicle headlights, radioactive slime, and so on. An example of this can be seen at the top of the next page.
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Another lighting aspect to avoid is lighting that is out of balance with the size of the source. An example could be a small light source that somehow manages to illuminate an entire room or corridor, as in this bad example on the right.Keep lighting in proportion to its source and its environment!Light sources can be anything: small or large lamps hanging on walls or from ceilings, the moon or the sun, crystals,lasers and other type of high-tech beams, fire, mirrors, magical effects, water surfaces that reflect light, lava, radioactive slime, and so on. Almost anything is possible as long as there is a noticeable source that is large enough to warrant the amount of light in an area.The same goes for the brightness of the source itself. If the lighting is very bright the source itself should not be dim. It should be just as bright and, if possible, be paired with effects, like a surrounding glow, to enhance the brightness.The example on the left is bad because the lamp appears to be ‘off’ even though the environment does seem to be receiving a lot of light emitting from it. The brightness of the light source and the brightness of the lighting in an area must be balanced and appear equal.
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Similarly, the player should see exactly where the light is coming from. The area near a source should appear the brightest. The left image is bad because the entire corridor has an equal brightness, which is strange. It doesn’t feel like the light is really coming from the lamps. The light should be considerably brighter near the source rather than ten meters further away in a corner. Its brightness should fade as it travels further and further away from the source. The light should show variation in brightness as it travels. This is not only more realistic but it also helps the lighting composition. Show a direct influence on one element from another!If there are multiple identical light sources in a row, such as the lamps in a corridor above, it can help to give some of the lights a slightly different color or brightness to add additional variation.
LIGHTING COMPOSITION
Think about the concepts explained in the composition and architecture chapters. If there are no, or barely any, changes and contrast in an area, then the scanline chart would be a very flat line. No change is repetitive and is thus predictable and boring. Lighting composition examines the way highlights and shadows are scattered around. If an area has flat lighting without any contrast, it will look boring. The best example of this is a corridor. By creating darker areas in between the highlighted areas the area gains some variation and thus it will be more visually appealing. Have a look at the example screenshot at the top of this page again.This is also true for rooms. If the entire room only has one light source then there is a good chance the lighting composition is not being exploited to its full potential; which is especially true for highlights. Shadow composition is much easier to achieve because it is simpler to create. A single light can create quite a lot of interesting shadows by itself but it will be much more difficult to create an interesting highlight composition, although it can be done.This is especially a problem for outdoor environments. Outdoor areas typically only have a single light source like the sun or the moon, and while a single lightsource in the sky can create nice shadows, it won’t succeed in creating a nice highlight composition. Both are needed to create a good composition. The shadows need to play with the bright highlights and in outdoor lighting this is too often forgotten.When I have to light an outdoor environment I always add highlights like small lamps, car headlights, torches, and any other small light sources that could give off light throughout the
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