You know, I’m like the biggest whiner on IRC. Whenever somebody shows something you can bet your ass I’ll have something negative to say about it. Sure, sure I try to work in some good constructive critasism in there as well but mainly, I’ll just whine over whatever the most obvious flaw is.
So let’s go back a few weeks when Schlauchi, this dude, was pimping The Haunted, a mod for UT3, in #unrealed on irc.quakenet.se and everything looked great, except the lighting. So I say ”hey, you need to work on lighting” and we got talking and he asked if I could help out. I love working with lighting and it has been quite a while since I worked in Unreal Engine 3 so I said ”sure”.
I wouldn’t go as far as to call myself ”Lead lighting artist”on the project because the actual desicons regarding the lighting is made through discussions with both Head of Game design(Schlauchi) and Head ofArt (Hegi). If I have a title it’s Light-suggestion-guy-and-put-shit-together-person. I make a lighting setup that I like, and then I show it to Hegi and Schlauchi, who makes comments based on either playtests or images.
I came into the project with the intention of making their mod more awesome without adding to their work load so most of the time I tried to stay out of their way.
TH-Canyon
This first picture is mostly for comparisson. This is how thelevel looked when I got in. The main problem I saw was that the lighting was just ”there” (if just barly). It didn’t add anything to the overall scenery, nothing popped. It was just ambient and boring.
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I havn’t worked with Unrealengine 3 since I finished my Shack-scene (link) and so I was a little rusty as I removed all lights from the entire map and started from skratch. This is what I came up with the same night that I downloaded the mod for the first time, without even having played it once. The feedback I got at that point was ”Too dark”, two words I would hear alot over the coming weeks…
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Still same setup as above, nothing changed or tweaked. I had never used Post Process volumes before but I know the ”just-about” of what they can and can not do but it was a whole lot of experementing this first night.
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I fooled around with the settings a bit and got to a point I thought was more pleasing for the eyes. As my main concern with the original lighting was that it was bland I may have gone overboard on the contrasts here in the begining but hell, contrast is good. It makes things pop!
I got feedback from Hegi that he wanted the sun in different position, behind the mountains on the ”left” of the map rather than streaming in from the front. I remember this as a backlash that first night because I had my mind set to this really cool looking lighting streaming in from the front of the map… At that point I closed down Unrealed and went to bed, trying to figure out how to best make it look good under these new conditions…
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So I changed the direction of the sunand fooled around with shadow contrasts and scene saturation for the entire level a bit… It was around this point I also actually joined the guys for a playtest and saw for myself what Schlauchi was talking about. The environment was indeed a bit too dark…
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Same settings as the last picture, but from a closer-to-players point of view.
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Same as above, also showing off how”dark” the level got in the shadows. I think it was around here that Hegi sent me the original references for the level and explained the setting a bit further.
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” A warm and dry desert camp”-kind of thing… ish. Tweaky tweakerson.
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”Alright” I say to myself… But How about some cold colors for contrast?
Response: TOO DARK! TOO COLD! The guys are hard to please but don’t wory, it all paid off in the end…
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There is a level event that happends every now and then when a storm sweaps across the level, leaving the otherwise sun lit hot desert in a dark and cold place. This was my first attempt at lighting that event. The only thing that has been altered is the Post Processing.
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I tried to please the guys with going to the extremes with HOT AND WARM desert-vibe. In the end, it proved too hard on the eyes during gameplay.
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I continued tweaking the Post Process effects for the storm-event. The feedback I got back from this picture was ”Too bright” which was nice for a change.
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Godrays… Got to love ’em! First test.
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I ended up importing a custom Godray-mesh, which was essentially a sphere scaled up slightly on the Z-axis (height) and with it’s pivot point at the top of the sphere to make it easy placing in the world. I then scaled the mesh again inside the editor up to 10 times (while having different values for the X and Y axis as well, for variation).
I used a volumetric god-ray shaderand and spent some time tweaking the colors, opacity, fade-out effects, particle-dust textures and a few leet hax here and there to come to a resault I was satesfied with.
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And here is the close-to-final version of the exterior lighting, God rays included.
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This is a picture of how the lighting in the interiors of the level looked in the original version.
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I added a bunch of secondary Post Proccess volumes to all interior spaces in Canyon and tweaked them specifically to add contrast between being indoors and being outdoor.
I also added a lantern to break up the otherwise greenage of the scene
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Of coure Schlauchi says ”TOO DARK!” so I added more lights and let up the intensity of the shadows.
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Even more…
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Added godrays to the lamps to all interior spaces and tweaked the material slightly.
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From start to finish I spent about 2-2½ weeks lighting this level, mostly during eavning/nights. I worked in sessions stretching from 2-4 hours.
Next up: TH-Stronghold.
