Light Up The World pt1

Another day in class and today's topic is lighting. I think I actually talked a bit about lighting in my last post, so it's time for an in depth explanation as today's notes.

To start things off, why should we even bother putting effort into video game lighting. Don't you just need to see? My opinion is that lighting is an under-appreciated story-telling mechanic and mood-setter that can make or break a good game. It can hide model and texture flaws, direct the player onward, draw the eye, and be used just like in any good horror movie to obscure the player's vision for a good shock. The absence of light is at least as important as the presence of it, as an area without lighting makes the player wary when coming from a sunny plain and helps keep the player focused on their objective by obscuring the pretty but unnecessary distractions.

Most of what we learned last semester involved dynamic lighting meaning lights coded into the game that can potentially move around and be used as spotlights. Static lights are more simple but equally effective at directing the player. These lights have less/no maneuverability as they are "baked" into the textures of an object in Maya before it ever even sees the game. However in spite of their more permanent state, static lighting is very useful from a graphical standpoint by taking up less computational power to look good.

There are 4 types of light that I've learned so far. They are:

• Emissive
• tied to an object; ie a computer screen, glowing orb, etc.
• Ambient
• constant value of the scene's natural brightness level
• Diffuse
• difference of light between areas (ie shading) that's the object's position relative to the light
• Specular
• the shininess of an object based on the position of the viewer relative to the object

Some lighting concepts I'd love to see in Up All Knight are harsher shadows from intense spot lights (ie the sun), god rays, and drop shadows. All fairly simple concepts but ones that are new to me!

Skyrim screenshot; example of god rays & lovely coloured lighting

Unknown source, but I liked the motorcycle drop shadows!

Here ends Day 1! Looks like we're continuing on next class with the rest of lighting, ttyl~