Environment & Lighting

Posted by Matheus Pitillo on Jun 21, 2012 in Life at VFS | 7 comments

Hey guys, what’s up? Term 03 is over and we are in our “almost one week” break of school. LOL. More details about how was the Term 03, I will detail in some of the next posts, ok? For now, I’m here to talk about the Environment & Lighting Class. I can not speak for everyone, but I think the biggest surprise of this term was this class. Everything that we learned and even the projects that we did were amazing. Seriously, one of the best classes of this term!

Environment & Lighting Class was a seven session course – inside the Game Art Streaming – in which we were introduced to the most fundamental elements of lighting and we learned how to apply these lighting principles into our game projects. The class was instructed by Vincent Chi, and he focus on the artistic and technical aspects of game lighting, plus hands-on lighting techniques practiced in each class. We studied the purpose and function of lighting, the power of it, the color of lighting, shaders, textures, light shapes, light pools, shadow, fog and post color tinting.

Vincent Chi is an EXCELLENT teacher, seriously! Its incredible how he teaches the class in an exciting and responsible way. You can clearly see that he loves the subject, and he want to teach us with all heart. 😀

Each class we were instructed with a different and important lighting fundamental element, and in the end of the class we needed to practice these new techniques learned, in one of our UDK scenes. In the end, in total, we had to submit only two assignments, both following the same idea. We needed to search for a Visual Target and then recreate the same lighting in our scene. We had the option to execute this visual target lighting in an UDK scene that we already have done, or we could just recreate the whole scene, based directly in the visual target.  What was considered for these assignments were:

• Is the lighting scene complete and matching with the visual target?
• Are shadows used appropriately to create depth?
• Does the lighting helps to tell the story?
• It was included different lighting tools?
• It was applied all of the lighting techniques learned in the course?

I ended up doing three different lighting, for three different visual targets. Until now we were just graded for the first one, and surprisely I got the BEST GRADE of the class. YEEEY! \o/ Vincent said that my work was very professional and followed all requisites of a game industry project. 😀 I was very happy to hear that from him.

For the first Visual Target Assignment I decided to chose the game Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception to use as reference for my lighting. The whole idea of the desert, with a pretty warm lighting reflecting in the sand, made me chose this. Even because the whole scene is in an open space, what gave me more chances to explore the skylight and colors.

My second Visual Target chosen was a Moonlight. For that one I didn’t submitted as one assignment. It was more about a study of lighting, to try to improve more my techniques. I decided to use my first DeathMatch level that I created in UDK in Term 02, and to execute the moonlight based on the picture that you can see below.

And finally, the third Visual Target that I followed – in which in the case was the second assignment – I decided to try something new, recreating a black and white lighting. And guys, you have no idea how hard is to do a B&W light. I thought that the experience would be very different, for sure, as I wasn’t using a lot of options of colors anymore, but when I started to do, I really saw how different it is. Between the tree studies, this one was the hardest one for me. And now that I’m seen that in the MAC screen, I actually don’t know if it is really good. LOL. But I’m really satisfied with the experience. 😉

Well, that’s all folks! I hope you liked. Please, leave a comment here, give me some feedback or any kind of opinion. But say something!! LMAO. Stay tuned, I will update my website again as soon as I can. Have a good week.