Star Citizen Live: Let There Be Light
Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment
- 00:00:03
uh hi everybody welcome to another episode of star citizen live game dev let there be light i'm your host jared huckabee and if you've never seen star citizen live before that's where we take about an hour out of our fridays at the end of our week and we goof off sometimes we answer some questions sometimes we review some process uh sometimes we sit down with one of our developers and we let we let them take us on a guided tour of their work and when that happens we call those episodes our game dev episodes and that's what we're doing this week joining us on the show this week is an esteemed guest from our lighting team mr chris campbell chris how you doing hey good thanks jared how are you this morning i'm all right uh thank you for agreeing to take the time out of your of every busy schedule as
- 00:00:51
we're heading into the the the the final furlough of alpha three one here uh i know or three three three one one i did it three one takes me back yeah do i look like i know what year it is it's the time is 2018 we're pretty uh as we're approached three eleven uh what are we doing today you are you are of course a uh uh what is it lead lighting yeah i'm grounded artist for the persistent universe all right and what are we what are we doing today uh so i just thought we would do like a quick kind of re-light ish of a surface outpost on hurston okay and and and the purpose of this is to is to kind of show us a little bit about your process what goes into it uh you you know we've had a lot of talks
- 00:01:40
offline uh lighting is something is one of the lighting and sound are two of my little uh pet projects with with game development because i i think there's a lot of misconceptions out there about what goes into it uh what makes good or effective lighting and stuff like that so um so we're gonna explore some of that process today uh if you want you're the driver on the passenger today so you can start your screen share and we'll just jump right into it okay share that there all right so yeah i mean i'll try and keep uh keep some of the boring technicalities out of it and focus on kind of making something cool and uh yeah just going through kind of my process of exploring a space and uh and kind of figuring out something to do with it so
- 00:02:29
so yeah i've basically got this uh this little habitation outpost which i've put on hurston um i've got access to the the sun time of day so i can quickly and easily change the time of day which is going to be useful um but of course everyone loves a good sunset so we can we can start off there i think um does it ever make you just feel powerful just being able to grab the sun like that and just be like oh i wish i could do that in real life just make it sunset all day long right so yeah uh just to start with this is this is kind of what what everyone should already know from from the insides of these um these habitation units uh and so what i've done is i've done like a kind of very rough quick redressing pass mostly just because uh without it you know the lighting's
- 00:03:20
very functional it's all kind of built into the um the structure uh and while there's there's a lot you can do when you're kind of building a space like this you can kind of design the lighting to fit in nice and neatly but since we're going to go a little bit crazy having a bit more freedom and a little bit more uh places and locations where we can kind of throw lights and cast weird shadows and stuff like that um yeah this is a this is going to be a good starting point all right so it's a oh then you you just turn on a layer or whatever so this you started with the base model uh rayari hab and then before the stream here you've spent some time redressing this yes yeah exactly i it's a maybe a little bit of cheating but i don't think anyone wants to watch me do
- 00:04:07
horrible environment art dressing work uh i'll leave that to the the pros in that department that's going to say has this been validated by the environment yeah no they know you're going rogue apologies to ian for destroying his happier okay uh cool so um i'll basically i'll turn off what's already there um and we'll kind of kick it off from there so that's the the old lights now gone uh what i will do is i'll keep all the cube maps because i think again that's kind of i mean it's a it's a very critical part of the job is kind of laying out cube maps for the best ambient lighting but uh no one wants to watch me do that for an hour as well so i'll use the existing cube maps well let's go ahead and talk a little bit about what a cube map
- 00:04:55
is though because the q map is incredibly important to lighting in the lumberyard engine so just introduce us to the concept of qmaps yeah sure so the cube map is um or the environment probe is kind of the the absolute fundamental part of our lighting kind of workflow so all without it you know we've just got basically a pitch black interior um it's pitch black because it's all interior and hidden away using visit areas and stuff which basically means that you start from absolutely zero lighting uh and what a an environment probe does is you kind of place a um kind of like an area of effect in this case these are all kind of cubes and with a little bit of softness on them and
- 00:05:42
and what they do is they they capture what's called a cube map which is just like a a texture which is captured from like uh imagine that each one of these has like a little camera pointed in all six directions of the cube it takes a screenshot and then reprojects that ambient light into all four directions so the more that you have theoretically the more detail you can get in your ambient lighting um these are generally approximations uh so i mean for example like on this side um of of this uh bed over here it's actually receiving the light from this cube map um so if i turn that one off then it gets more lighting from this cube map and and vice versa so yeah i don't know i'm sorry chat i i
- 00:06:29
want to say that i i see your puns and they are sustaining me keep them going um so that that's what a cube map is but why do we need cube maps why is this the is is why are cube maps necessary well without them and unfortunately still still not having any kind of rage racing or something like that um you need ambient lighting in the game uh you know a long time ago uh you would just have kind of a consistent ambient value which would be like some kind of gray or blue or taken from the sky color so some kind of orange and that would just be projected throughout the entire world in kind of a uniform way but cube maps allow us to uh kind of
- 00:07:19
account for um occlusion based on like the window for example uh or the ceiling or the floor which makes things then appear darker which gives you more um uh depth of contrast between like the interior which is nice and dark here versus the exterior uh out there okay yeah and the the brighter it gets outside i i'm not sure how easily some of this will pick up on stream but the brighter gets on the outside uh the cube maps will recapture uh and then you'll get like even more kind of light spilling in so if we don't have any lights at all uh you get already this kind of nice bass ambient lighting um look yeah and if you want to actually see the cube maps i can turn on like this little
- 00:08:07
uh debug mode and i'll turn off the screen space reflections so this is basically like all of the cur all of the materials have just turned into like a a glossy kind of like a chrome mirror for example and this shows you what each of the cube maps kind of reflection maps are picking up so obviously towards the the windows you're getting a lot of this exterior lighting and that's getting uh reprojected in into the the room so when i turn it back on uh you can see like these highlights coming in uh on the the more reflective surfaces and this is without any additional lighting whatsoever this is just the base kind of ambience nice all right yeah so that's that's where we'll start so we know like the so we know one of the the current hotness and video cards
- 00:08:54
anything is ray tracing yeah and stuff like that but not everybody will have a card that's capable of doing ray tracing exactly i mean it's it's an extremely intensive graphically heavy process and i think it's it's still a ways out for a lot of game development um but obviously something that we we want to explore at some point for sure only we will have a couple unique challenges we'll have to figure out how it works with a 360 degree fully realized planet and exactly all that stuff so we will have some challenges maybe some other folks may not but it's definitely something that we're we intend to pursue yeah yeah exactly but in the meantime environment probes
- 00:09:43
in the meantime we've got cube maps and environment probes and uh that's you know that's that's good enough for like kind of 95 percent of cases cool so yeah so i apologize for derailing you you no that's that's totally fine um derail away uh okay so i find the topic very illuminating i totally stole that from chat yeah so i mean uh i i don't know i don't know if it's probably just me but i already really like uh looking at scenes where there are there's no lighting and it's basically just simulations of the um the exterior lighting kind of bouncing around in an interior i always think that looks really cool you get lots of nice reflections and stuff like that so uh you'll have to forgive me if i i might
- 00:10:32
noodle around a bit and just kind of look at certain angles um but that's also kind of part of the lighting process is like finding good kind of i guess what we would call like screenshot moments where you find like a nice kind of uh a nice kind of framing um with like some nice dark spots some nice lighting spots uh and then we can kind of build from there so like uh yeah like here for example you get some nice spill through here it's getting a little bit dark over there and so maybe we'll we can start adding some light back there and just see what happens yeah by all means you do you alrighty you just tell us what you're doing all right i'm gonna add a light there we go and we're done so that's uh that's lighting for you uh so uh obviously
- 00:11:22
just adding in a light by default just gives me a nice kind of white very boring light by itself but obviously you want to see what you're doing so um i mean a lot of people may notice where some of these props come from uh when i was building this uh this dressing i was kind of thinking it's maybe some guy who works in lowerville uh and he's kind of a little bit fed up of the hurstons and he's maybe stolen some stuff uh from lorville and he's brought it out to his little drug stash he stole some pictures of he stole pictures of the people that he hates and hung them on as well he broke in there and then he wants to you know graffiti them up a little bit all right again apologies to the environment art team no no we're just learning more about you than anything else yeah right all right so i'm gonna start with uh
- 00:12:10
like these these props already have uh some light fixtures built into them um so i think what could be cool to start with is just like some little kind of dim i don't know lighting or information over here uh just to make it a little bit less flat i'm gonna turn this guy on let's start with a nice dim kind of intensity i'm going to link the light to the picture frame which then uh so each uh each asset or material can have like a glow assigned to it and that can sometimes be controlled by a light source once we link it to it and then let's make this a projector light and we'll give it just a simple kind of projection
- 00:13:02
widen it up a little bit and we're off to our start [Music] so that's kind of cool it's just a little bit uh horror movie desk like kind of the the pictures following you along the wall uh let's go with something a little bit warmer in color maybe i think this guy's a little bit sick so we'll use a lot of like kind of greenish greenish yellows and stuff like that reduce the radius because we're always thinking about performance let's expand it a little bit let's make it a little bit brighter you mentioned performance very casually but it's there's always got to be this
- 00:13:52
ever looming shadow this presence over everything you do where yeah it's you have to resist the urge to go hog wild or crazy but at the same time one of the tenants of star citizen is always pushing the envelope as they say you know as far as we can how do you balance that exactly i mean yeah as you say we're we're certainly not shying away from expensive uh lighting setups and and you know kind of pushing the boundaries there um but at the same time um yeah obviously we wanna we want people to be able to run the game uh at a somewhat decent frame rate uh so when we're when we're building our lighting uh for environments we always just try and keep it in the back of our mind like
- 00:14:39
some rough guidelines of how many lights we can use uh how many shadow casting lights we can use and how many lights are overlapping in the scene at any given moment and those are just kind of things that we um we you feel out as you as you work on the project a little bit more um so i've got some some numbers in my head um and uh yeah it's just it's more a habit at this point so i just kind of try and stick with it i don't want to you know reveal too much of the magician's secrets but yeah you you mention it shadow casting lights uh the existing of a shadow casting light implies the existence of lights that don't cast shadows yes exactly um yeah so for example i mean
- 00:15:29
you know especially for demonstration purposes we want it to look as good as possible so i'm turning on shadows quite often um but probably probably i guess like 80 of the lights that we're placing generally don't cast shadows and uh the the basic kind of thought process there is that if it's if it's some kind of uh ambient light or it's just kind of acting as a fill for the environment uh you don't always need to have shadows turned on so like for example um let's say that this was quite bright let's make it a little bit brighter um and this is again like kind of one of those things where when you don't have ray tracing um and the kind of methods that offline renderers use you have to kind of fake a lot of things um so in this example like there's no bounce light
- 00:16:16
coming from this uh this light here hitting the floor and then like shining back up you know if i turn it off and on there's no difference in this uh this part of the frame right so what we'll do sometimes is we'll add like a kind of a bounce light uh or a fill kind of light and in this case i'll just extend the bulb a little bit so it's a bit softer i'm kind of thinking that i want the light source to be about as big as the um the cone of this light hitting this uh this pile of dirty laundry on the floor so i'll bring that down to about there and then lighting is is pretty much all about ratios so it's all about how bright is your key light and then how bright are the subsequent bounce and
- 00:17:03
fill lights and that kind of stuff to create contrast uh in your scene so right now this this fill light is just way too bright so i'd bring that way down and even more than that probably even more than that and so now it's very subtle but it just adds a little bit of that kind of greenish uh light kind of bouncing up into the ceiling and uh and against these these areas uh and this light because it's so subtle in the grand scheme of things it doesn't need shadow casting to go back to your initial point so key lights shadow casting fill lights no shadow casting it it's always a hard balance because yeah in an ideal situation of course every single light would be shadow casting and
- 00:17:52
and ray tracing would be on everything and you know you obviously you you want you want to push these things as far as possible but the performance performance is and optimization is such an important consideration these things you always you take you take it to the point of looking awesome you often have to scale it back uh you know by degrees to get to the point where it's performative yeah yeah exactly i mean obviously we we try and replicate the real world as much as possible and you know in the real life in the real world i'm not sure i've i've heard of a light source that doesn't cast shadows um that would be interesting um so that's that's obviously the goal but then the the realities of kind of computer graphics uh tends to get in the way of
- 00:18:40
that sometimes all right so uh yeah i'm i'm basically just like kind of putting in whatever i feel is going to kind of help the scene so one thing that i like to always try and add is a little bit of movement in the lighting um that also it helps especially in our engine like a lot of other engines use baked uh lighting which then tends to be very static and you know once it's baked that's kind of how it looks um but our engine is and always has been like purely dynamic uh the only thing that is baked would be kind of these cube maps uh and even then we we update and refresh those every now and then um so it's always nice to
- 00:19:29
to make the most out of that uh those dynamic lights by you know making the move around or adding a little bit of uh extra animation and stuff like that to kind of help it out right you're talking about the uh the recently updated uh runtime probes yes yeah exactly so all of these probes are are set to be runtime so i'm not manually rebaking them but i do sometimes will i'll just select them all and then kind of hit refresh to force them to update in case they're not updating fast enough for my tastes so i'm going to create another weight uh from the chat uh what is the exposure control in a scene if you brighten it up a few stops uh does it change the scene much do we control exposure um we
- 00:20:19
uh from it on an artist's perspective we don't control the exposure itself directly uh we kind of we control the exposure through how bright we make our lighting and in the background we have this kind of auto exposure system uh which you know has like a maximum brightness range and a darkness uh range and then it kind of you know tries to strike a balance in between so i've got these buttons up here which will let me kind of force the exposure to a certain um almost kind of like an f-stop but it's actually it's an ev value and an exposure value so like this for example i've got it locked to an ev of 10 which works fine kind of outside and then you know once you get inside the the darker areas start getting really really dark uh almost pitch black and so without it um the auto exposure can kind of kick in
- 00:21:08
and then lift those areas uh and that's kind of how you get like kind of blown out um and then um you know when you're outside looking in then you'd get kind of like darker looking interiors from a distance until you kind of enter them so that's kind of how we work with our dynamic range but we don't actually have any individual control like say if i wanted this room specifically to be a certain exposure brightness i i don't have that which is fine because we have so many locations in our game having that extra level of control just means more time tweaking it more more opportunities for bugs to appear that kind of stuff i know star citizen and lumberyard
- 00:21:58
support uh hdr how does that how does that affect your work um like uh hdr monitors or yeah i like your like high dynamic range monitors and stuff does that does that do that play a factor in how you light a scene um not so much actually i uh the the hdr um system is kind of like a it's a back end kind of a graphics uh system which will um i mean i can't i don't know the tactical so you'd have to ask someone like ali yeah um but uh basically it's all kind behind the scenes so it takes whatever we've lit and then it you know pushes things in certain in certain directions to uh to work for hdr so i mean another kind of thing that i
- 00:22:51
do when i am lighting a scene is uh i mean one of the kind of things that um that ian really likes as our environment art director um is he likes lots of like kind of low angle glancing lights um and this this comes from you know a lot of the art direction of our game comes from roger deakins and uh um uh james cameron uh you know aliens and that kind of stuff uh kind of 80s 90s sci-fi movies and you know it's in cinematics and movies you've always got very low lights you've always got lots of like specular highlights and stuff like that and so sometimes when i'm i'm looking to start lighting a scene i'll just kind of place a light and just kind of look around for again
- 00:23:40
kind of looking for those moments where i can see like you know like oh maybe i really like how the light pings off this uh this locker here and gives me a nice hot spot down there and then when i find a spot where i like the light then i'll try and find a way to motivate it either by adding a light fixture or you know something glowing or some reason for the light to be there because generally we we want to minimize how many lights just exist in the world but don't actually have a source right i was i was actually going to be my next question uh we started this by start working with one of the lights that were already there in the scene with the light that was uh embedded at the top of the picture frame but yeah as you work and as you go my next question was how many times do you have to
- 00:24:28
do do you have to go back to the environment artist or the prop artists and ask for a light here or there so that so that you can motivate your uh design decisions yeah that that's uh that's usually something that we try and do um as early in the process as possible so like the environment our team will will block out a location um and then we'll we'll come in and set up our cube maps and all the kind of technical basics um and at the same time try and think about where we want our key lights to come from and if we need to request any changes to the geometry or or the layout to accompany that um then that's that's usually the best time to do it um because uh later on when art starts getting final it's uh it gets a little a little tight to request these kind of changes right so i kind of like where this uh
- 00:25:18
this light is here um i'm going to give it a light fixture uh and i'm just going to fly down to i kind of got a an asset zoo under the planet of all of the lighting fixtures that we tend to use in the game um this actually exists under the planets in the in the precision universe too guys if you oh yeah you can find it if sometimes if you fall through the planet at the right place you can find our acid zoos so this is a guy i like to use often so i'll basically just i i'm kidding about that don't don't tell ian i said yeah this absolutely does not exist in the in the game i'd be in a lot of trouble i get an email from me and did you did you tell people we left lights under the planet here we go and now i've got it kind of
- 00:26:11
just roughly rotated and then i'm gonna there we go that's not to say sometimes there's not something left under the planet an accident that has happened that does happen well you know it does happen completely unintentionally where they shouldn't spawn yeah that happens in almost every video game you just find a random asset somewhere where it's not supposed to be and it's like oops yeah but that's sometimes that's part of the fun is finding something that shouldn't be there so uh so yeah i mean one other thing like why i'm in this uh this kind of debug view um as a lighting artist you're often
- 00:26:59
working in extremely dark locations and you know if you're trying to it would be like in real life trying to like put a light source while you're staring directly at it and figuring out where it goes against the wall uh so sometimes i just turn on this um this debug that just uh removes all lighting information and just shows me the albedo textures and then i can see where i want to actually place my my light source do you know what albedo means oh that's uh you're putting me on the spot there i mean i i know roughly what i don't know what the the origin of the word is i assume it's really latin or something all right i've asked this question on three different shows where it's come up like this and nobody's had the answer so it's just a curiosity i know but i'm not going to tell you okay right i mean it's uh i mean the albedo itself is like the
- 00:27:47
um it's like an index for how much light a as a material reflects uh from its surface all right there you but the word itself i don't know alrighty so we've got this guy and again like uh it's it's very dark back up in the corners and you'd expect some level of bounce i think having this hit down here so i'm gonna go ahead and just add a a simple kind of uh bounce light and see see where we go with that and a lot of lighting uh just ends up being quite a bit of like trial and error and just figuring stuff out the more you do it then you kind of get a feeling for what is more likely to work than not um but there's there's still a lot of kind of exploration
- 00:28:36
that goes into it so there we go so now we've got like some nice kind of highlights up here filling out the room a little bit more without it it's it's a little bit too contrasty then uh yeah it's always good good idea to remember to like refresh the probes because they will the more light you add the more light gets picked up by the probes and then once the probes get recalculated the scene gets brighter and then maybe that's too bright and then you you have to kind of balance the lighting back and forth that's a lot of balancing acts but it actually looks kind of cool from this uh this side as well um earlier in the show you said you had some numbers in your head uh we were talking about performance uh is there anything you could you can share the questions that was coming from the chat is was asking if you had a percentage
- 00:29:23
quotient that you that you that you aim for when doing something like this sure uh i mean in terms of uh lights that we have on screen our general rule of thumb is to keep it around well not around but under like 280 lights on screen at any given moment and you may think that that's like a lot and how would you ever get to that kind of number um but i mean especially in a sci-fi game almost all light sources are man-made light sources and you've got spaceships which all have built into them and you've got players running around with their flashlights and all of these kind of things add up to that that total so we actually we hit that limit frequently
- 00:30:11
and uh and we hit it hard so i'm gonna counteract the blue from this light i'm just gonna make this one a warmer color instead if i was coming in here i'd want my my three identical jumpsuits to uh to be the main focus so i'll just angle it a little bit more towards on the uh the suits themselves and when you said a 180 lights it was 180 right let's just say uh 200 200 200 so you said 208 lights that's on screen at any one time so that's not even like in a scene it's just wherever exactly this person can look in this camera frame so like there could be another 280 lights behind me but
- 00:31:00
as long as it's only in the in the frame and that's kind of good um so yeah i mean some some environments like big city locations and stuff you know the total number of lights in that location could easily exceed like a thousand or two thousand um lights that we actually end up placing and then we we use as many tricks as we can to kind of keep that number down per frame um yeah we got those guys all right cool uh just as i'm just going to offer a correction to some things i'm saying in chat rtx was not answered as no we do not have retracing in right now uh it is something that we want to
- 00:31:50
investigate and explore in the future so yeah there there was not a no to ray tracing as i'm seeing some people in chat uh regurgitate it's just on the list and there are other priorities ahead of it that's all exactly i mean again i don't want to i don't want to step on ali's shoes too much here but um you know before we even start talking about ray tracing we have to get the gen 12 renderer um up and running and that's kind of the main priority i think for the graphics just like all things the game development priorities he can't fortunately we can't work on everything all at the same time exactly i'm going to try and find something else to use here thinking i'm thinking of something for
- 00:32:40
his desk so i want like a i know like a desk light i guess so let's see if we got something in here jeez um i'm just gonna i'm gonna improvise a little bit i'm sure there's some props artists that's like yeah i've made 300 different light fixtures yeah exactly um yeah but if they don't tell us that they made it then then i don't know it exists okay he's looking kind of bright in here that's that's a bit of a worry let's not use him where do we keep the well this kind of
- 00:33:31
looks like a desk light let's use that but yeah we we certainly have a a lot of props in this game it can be very daunting trying to look through them for something oops i'm gonna put this in here there we go i'm just going to create a new light put it up here link it that linked let me see no select oh there it is okay all right same process and
- 00:34:23
add a texture let's use something a little bit different now let's go with this one and of course it's slightly offset which makes my my life a little bit harder so now i have to manually kind of drag it into place so about all about finding the right camera angle to move something five centimeters all right that's that there let's lighten it up let's turn on the shadows link the light to the actual um mesh
- 00:35:16
itself and then i can like drag them around together and find a decent kind of position for it we've had some questions about the uh aspect ratio you're working in this looks like what 21.9 uh yeah something like that it's um it's an ultra wide uh asus predator you're not getting paid don't do that uh i'll i'll take my check now asus uh is that just is there an advantage for your workflow to work in a ultra wide or is it just something you like um initially i like when i first got it it took a little bit of time to kind of get used to having such like a wide screen because i like having more vertical space as well like especially when you start
- 00:36:04
having like all these properties to adjust um you can never have enough vertical space but the more that i've worked with it definitely um it's absolutely awesome for having just like a massive viewport that you can work with um and at the same time like uh you know the more cinematic you want to get obviously the wider the screen and then it it just makes it really easy to like get those kind of cinematic angles uh and and wide kind of letterbox uh moments um so that's good but definitely what helps more is a second monitor which uh is not being shared at the moment where i've got like it's just toolbars and uh and other kind of tool windows would be impossible without a second monitor for sure
- 00:36:54
okay every time you go back to this section i just think about how we should open up like the like a lamps plus store in reverse that would be good it's a chain we have here in the states a story that just sells nothing but i'd be done with that at least they did in the 80s and early 90s i don't know if they're still around anymore yeah hey lamps plus if you're still around where's my check so i'm gonna make this it's like basically coming out of this this guy this would uh this could be a good
- 00:37:42
excuse to actually use one of our planar so we do have um slash area lights uh in the engine um they're more expensive than normal lights so we can't use too many of them um they're also they don't cast area shadows which is a a bit of a limitation so we try to only use them in in areas where it would be really noticeable if the specular highlight wasn't the shape of the light fixture itself so i'll try and see if it if it makes sense for this spot here i'm going to turn off the shadows because you can see you start getting like some really weird artifacts so let's turn that guy off
- 00:38:33
that's kind of cool because now the the reflection kind of matches up with um with the light source itself yeah i spent 30 seconds trying to come up with a joke about the light being playing and i i didn't [ __ ] do it you can make it nice and boring a boring white light i'm just off i'm off today and chat with you yet chad wasn't there to help me all right so i think by itself this light's not not quite doing it for me um so you can see like what i what i'm kind of looking for here is again always trying to like pick out certain materials uh and i'm getting like a little bit of light on the tops of these of this uh kind of leather chair but i just want to
- 00:39:22
add another light a little bit higher up kind of angled a little bit more down on this guy that's gonna that's gonna give me what i want and i'll try and position it so that i don't see like like an extra specular highlight and in this case i can add a little bit of shadows as well yeah there we go now if someone was sitting there they would look pretty cool um all righty what else we're going to 20 minutes left wow this is uh not going as fast well maybe it just
- 00:40:10
took a lot longer when i was setting this up initially um no that's okay it's one of the reality is every time we do this every time we do one of these shows it's work does not happen on an hour by hour basis there's very few things in game development you can complete uh in an hour nice and tidy in an hour but it i can do like maybe one of those cooking shows and here's one i prepared earlier kind of moments but uh i think that maybe maybe that's kind of cool and then we'll we can spend a bit of time looking at like a night time i'll do some some character lighting on this guy here um as i said he's very untrustworthy of people coming by his uh his little shack so he's prepared and got a pistol as well i know the other thing i really i was proud of this
- 00:40:59
he like he stole some of the transit signs from louisville and brought them back to his place i'm gonna get a letter from the environment art team yeah there's a lot of things here that should not be in the same location all right so i'm just gonna turn on the the stuff that i had done kind of last time and i'll just run through a little bit of what i was looking at so again like kind of finding areas um in the location where there's like some interesting props or opportunities to add a little bit of kind of life um so i thought having some like broken broken lights hanging over by his t-shirts would be kind of cool um i get a lot of inspiration from um erica gagnon who's the the art director from uh deus
- 00:41:48
ex of the new deus ex games and um we like to kind of do some kind of like light sculptures uh in a similar kind of way that he's uh that he's concepted and and that's in those games and it kind of matches the the hurston style like we took a lot of uh the loreville cbd art style um took a bit of inspiration from from those concepts as well so i thought that that kind of matched up with his uh his work desk he's uh he's a little bit lonely um so you've got to have some some company for your tea party when you when you're uh taking a few too many substances out in the desert all right so yeah let's uh let's look
- 00:42:38
out here just a reminder to folks who are submitting questions in the chat uh chris is a lighting artist if your question is about process in how to light a scene those are the types of questions that are appropriate for chris if your question is gameplay related or even graphics related or engine related stuff which we've talked about to some extent uh those aren't questions that are appropriate for for chris that's my jam yeah so see a lot of really good and really interesting questions unfortunately chris is not the person uh for those in case you're wondering why are they answering asking my i'd love to answer it if i knew the answer remember this is an art process stream so if your question is about the process of lighting or a space that's appropriate
- 00:43:25
if it's can we shoot out lights or stuff like that or gameplay related stuff is not the stream for that unfortunately wrong chris one day maybe one day i'll know enough about everything that i can just do every question that you've got uh so what i'm gonna do now is just for the the sake of lighting this guy i'm gonna set up a camera that i can use um and the main reason for that is just that i want to i want to get some nice depth of field and separation on the background here so i'm going to knock that down crank up the focus distance a bit see if i can find where that focal plane
- 00:44:14
is about right uh we're missing some background there so a couple million kilometers of rendering distance and i'm just gonna try and angle this guy a little bit here so all right so actually it looks like just these these lights from the environment already do a pretty decent job um but i'm going to get rid of those lights and kind of do something else i think uh that's on this layer it looks like it's probably the probe a bit of uh some redness from something
- 00:45:06
uh as a follow-up to your uh 280 uh light source question do do vfx and and other intermittent light sources like that count against that number uh they would so if if vfx um was doing something i don't know like for example like fireflies and they were cut they had light sources they were giving off that would all count towards that that limit what i don't know though is if they were i don't know if there's a difference between like gpu particles if they were casting lights versus kind of the light entities that we place if that kind of runs through a different system or not uh but i would guess that they all kind of uh follow the same uh the same budget sorry i just had to delete a inappropriate message in chat there
- 00:45:57
all right so right now i'm seeing like my q map is picking up a lot of red and that's uh from the the glow that's kind of built into the um the structure here so i'm actually just gonna go in and i'm just gonna kill the glow in the material uh just because i want a as clean a a base as possible to light this guy's head chat seems to think this is a clem's uh twin brother cletus yeah exactly this is a desert climb so i'm gonna grab this glow and i'm gonna kill it there we go and i'll rebake this guy that's better so there's a little bit of
- 00:46:47
uh of light coming from these guys back here but that'll be fine i'm just gonna add to it i think all right so uh when it comes to character lighting it's it's uh i guess it's kind of similar to doing environment lighting but um obviously you've got a single thing to focus on whereas in the environment different camera angles um different points of interest that kind of stuff so for a character i'll start looking a key light source and again i don't have anything immediately motivating in the scene i've got these guys back here so i'll probably use that as a motivated rim light and i'm just going to do like a basic um three point lighting setup which is kind of the the most common uh way to light characters
- 00:47:36
or to light humans in general finding a good kind of brightness value for my for my key light and turn it into a projector and shine it at him and find where i want it to land something like that turn on shadows of course get some nice uh nice self shadowing i'll try and just move it around a little bit and see if i can find something kind of cool so i made like for the for the real klim you know we had some very dramatic lights because that that kind of lent
- 00:48:22
itself to his his cd environment um so i'll do something a little bit similar i mean his face just just begs for some sinister looking lighting so yeah it cannot be understated how important lighting is especially for character it's like when you had it there and it was completely blown out uh you know he just thought yeah kind of weird and off-putting but now he looks yeah yeah you can you can light something really bad really easily let's find a nice kind of mid-point here let's let's go with this um and let's let's find a nice color it's always interesting kind of picking
- 00:49:10
a color sometimes you got to be careful because the more saturated you get you can really start making human skin look really sick and uh and dead um what's the uh let's go with something like from mandy that would be kind of cool we've got a little bit of frame rate slow down here is that is that happening in the engine or is that just uh our video chat uh i think it might be the video my frame rate's looking pretty good at the moment oh well we're working with what we got all right and now i'm gonna add a light kind of to help help the rim light here so i mean this is kind of exactly what you would on a movie set as well you'd hide something
- 00:49:58
up off screen if the lights themselves aren't enough then you just kind of add a little bit extra and in this case i'm not going to use a color i'm going to use an actual light temperature because we can basically pick uh with our lights if we want to use like a gel which would just be any kind of saturated rgb color uh obviously you can find the right colors in there but it's a bit more difficult or we also have like proper light temperatures from like a 1000 to 15k range but i'm gonna match these guys out there they look like they're about 35k all right so that's the rim light portion we'll just keep it there for time's sake and then just add a fill
- 00:50:52
and again like with those ratios it's so easy to just completely nuke it uh with the fill light being too bright so let's let's bring that guy down and maybe let's see maybe this is like a slightly bluer i always like playing with some really extreme lighting colors uh maybe this is maybe this is like from the uh from the sky actually so let's jump out instead of coming from the bottom i'm going to bring this fill up kind of bring it out from the side or from the top yeah that's kind of cool
- 00:51:45
there you go so we get some nice like subsurface scattering in his ears from the rim light i'm not loving my my brake lights uh key light here so let's let's try and find something else just go with something kind of sickly warm i mean and as as with kind of everything in lighting is like you can you're never really done you just kind of stop at some point when it looks good that's that is true of every every art well discipline there is you know
- 00:52:32
i don't remember who had the original quote but art is never finished it's only abandoned yeah exactly so once the deadline hits then then i'm done but uh yeah you can you can tweak this stuff forever so now what i'm looking for is um if i turn this off and just go back into my camera his eyes are looking very flat and dead and that's just because the the placement of my lights just means that i'm not getting a specular highlight catching in his eyes which is very common in the in cg or computer graphics so i'm just going to add a specific catch light just to help that out a little bit um because without it eyes start to look really dead i gotta i gotta find this the sweet spot
- 00:53:23
it's starting to come in now turn it way down yeah there we go all right as we demonstrated before you you're setting your lights down getting the lights you want and then you'll find fixtures to yeah exactly i mean in this case like maybe i'm i'm doing something for a cinematic uh so like the the pipeline for or workflow for lighting a cinematic is very different from what we would do in the pu so uh what we what we try and do is is make our characters look as good as possible all the time but you know the the difference between
- 00:54:11
a a movie and a game like the primary difference obviously is that you can move around you can come at a character from any angle and uh therefore the artist doesn't really have any true control over how the character looks um in a movie you know everything is set very very specifically in every single shot and lights don't generally make sense like they're just kind of placed in space around reflected that kind of stuff um for a game like if this was a game character that we were doing this uh this light rig probably wouldn't work and i would have to kind of unfortunately kill kill everything i've just done uh weep a little bit and then start again and uh in this case i would um try and find a way to to motivate that
- 00:55:04
from the scene so i'd i'd pick a kind of a direction uh so maybe maybe he's got like some lights hanging off of his um off of his thing here and then i'll try and see if i can make something like that work like this kind of gives him a little bit of a bit mysterious kind of don't want to mess with him vibe and then again luckily because it's a sci-fi game we can kind of we can justify having lights in places most people wouldn't actually put lights so if i put a light on the floor um kind of like how i had in in the original lighting setup you can have something down here and now now if this was like kind of game lighting or like in game lighting it would be a little bit closer to something like this
- 00:55:52
and then we can kind of tweak things a um we just have a little bit less of that that really fine control like specifically with putting in a um a an eye catch light like the specular highlights on his eyes that's a lot more hard a lot harder to to motivate in an actual level design kind of sense of lighting cool yeah that's uh that's kind of cool there so yep did that light go i had a light in oh well it's lost to the ages and i think finally we'll just pull the sun up
- 00:56:43
and let cletus klim bask in the uh the morning glow of another day yeah there we go very cool thank you so much chris yeah anytime taking us through a bit of your process i mean obviously you know every time we do one of these shows whether it's lighting or props or weapons or characters or whatever uh you can't fit the uh you can't fit the entire process in the space of an hour yeah i mean there's so much more that i could do um so many different angles that you can approach this stuff from so we do appreciate the the the scratching the surface if you will
- 00:57:30
uh taking this um you can go ahead and stop the screen share uh that's it for the show this week guys uh as we are as we like to do here we are going to throw the raid to a star citizen streamer who is streaming right now uh my understanding is that it is hc vertigo uh who haven't seen in quite some time i i i i've i'm at hc vertigo a couple of times there's a pretty good streamer i think he's mining right now so um when you if you want to join in the raid you can hit the little button at the top of the chat and you join the raid and uh when you get there uh everybody scream turn the lights on he'll have absolutely no idea uh what's going on uh for for star
- 00:58:19
citizen live uh i'm jared uh that's chris join us uh next week uh for a very special ship showdown live uh it's gonna be different uh until then we'll see you then uh take care uh be safe and uh keep on trucking i don't know see everybody you
Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.
