Overall, I’d say I spent the last couple of years learning how to push the craft of game lighting even further, and I was fortunate enough to have learned new things with such an amazing team.

WWII Lighting

The brilliant minds at Sledgehammer Games established the core aesthetics of the film look you mentioned. The lighting team at Raven had leeway in interpreting our part of the contribution, but everything needed to be cohesive in the end. I certainly had a blast collaborating with them to make sure that happened!

I have to note that the shots on Artstation have been lightly tweaked from what appears in the shipped version of the game. There wasn’t much film grain visible during gameplay. So as a personal decision for the sake of presentation, I embellished the screenshots to make them feel more like stills from a movie.

For the two environments I worked on for WWII, my tasks were:

world lighting and atmosphere

post-processing like bloom and such

exposure control and balancing

the local lighting in the gameplay spaces to make interiors feel consistent with exteriors

in-game cinematic lighting for brief character moments

color grading to make it all cohesive

The same art director at Raven gave me direction for both environments, and after some initial discussions and tests, we agreed that it would be best to approach the mood with a naturalistic documentary feel (not to call too much attention to “pretty” lighting and to present it in a matter-of-fact way).