To me lighting is one of the key elements of every game’s environment. Well executed lighting can really make the whole scene look awesome even if the texturing or modeling work is not at its best. By setting up proper lighting early in the process you can plan and decide what elements of your scene you want to show and expose and by doing this you have an easy decision later about on what models and props you will have to spend more time modeling and texturing and which one of them you can just do fast and not very detailed as they will stay in the shadowed areas. With that particular scene, I was aiming for the feeling of abandonment and a little bit of mystery. My big inspiration here were some levels from The Last Of Us and Silent Hill series. I wanted to make an animation with the camera fly-by so I really needed the scene to be lit well to bring out all the nice details that I was planning to create. Also my supplemental goal was that all the materials should have a very “dusty” feeling and I decided this will be much easier to demonstrate if the classroom will be presented in a daylight. That was my first major decision that also affected my choice of colors for all the elements in the scene – I wanted to make sure that they will work well with the warm sunlight – it really helped to bring all colors together and make the scene look more consistent.

My rule of thumb when it comes to setting up lights for game environments is “the less light sources the better”. What I like about this approach is that it creates better feeling for the direction of the light and this provides better clues for the player to navigate through the level. It also makes the light iteration process much faster as you only have to deal with a few lights. I always start with the main light and try to set it up in the way that I can get some interesting shadows casted on walls and props for a more dramatic and interesting result. If I use sunlight or moonlight then I let the global illumination to do its thing and that is usually enough to properly light outdoor scenes. However, I never trust the light algorithm completely to do the entire job for me and quite often I end up adding some fake light sources, if I feel like this will be beneficial for the scene. Usually it takes some time to set up the right direction and proper amount of bounces for the main light to get the desired effect. Of course sometimes it is important to throw an extra light here and there to draw player attention, or to achieve a certain artistic effect. Things get more complicated with lighting interiors but even then I try to plan my scene in the way that I can get some natural light coming into the room (breaking a wall or a roof, making bigger windows or leaving the door wide open could be helpful – all kind of tricks are allowed as long as it looks natural). Of course there are situations when you can only use artificial lights but even then I stick to my rule “the less light sources the better” and try to keep the amount of lights on the small side by providing one key light that does 80% of the job and then maybe adding some extra lights to highlight places or things important for the player. Quite often I try to choose colors of the lights in the way so they complement each other. Very important thing is not to get carried away and overdo things – too many light sources, from too many directions will make the scene look noisy and hard to read, not to mention about performance issues if you happen to light the level only by using dynamic lights.