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Introduction to Lighting

Submitted by Jherax on Tue, 2003-12-23 16:50.

It’s been said by many that lighting can make or break your level. It’s easy to see the difference between poorly- and well-lit rooms, as shown below.

   

Having proper lighting works to serve two general purposes: it allows your players to recognize different areas of your map easier and also works to augment your theme/design. In some cases, lighting may also serve as a gameplay element. One good example of using lighting as a gameplay element can be seen in the mod Gloom by Team Reaction. While the human bases in the maps tend to be well lit, the spider bases are dimly lit to give each team the upper hand on their turf.

Although in classic lighting theory, lighting tends to be grouped into three main categories, key lighting, fill lighting, and back lighting – in game design we’re principally concerned with key and fill lighting. Key lighting makes your maps more dramatic and visually intriguing; fill lighting softens up the key lighting and makes your lighting appear richer and feel “fuller.”

Depending on the game engine you’re working with, you’ll probably have the choice between point lights (also referred to as omni lights), spotlights, and texture lights. For key lighting you’ll want to use mainly point lights and spotlights since they tend offer a greater degree of control. Fill lighting can be done with any type of light and tends to be dimmer than key lighting.

When you’re using colored lighting, try to keep your bright colors to your key lighting – otherwise you risk over saturating a room with color. Make sure you soften up the color by using off-whites for your fill lighting. This will make the color feel more natural when viewed with the rest of the room.

By using different types of off-whites for your fill lighting, you can adversely affect the mood of your map. Using a greenish off-white, for example, produces an effect similar to the kind seen in the Matrix movies, while a bluish off-white can make your room appear cooler. Take some time to experiment with this .

It’s important for all of your lights to have realistic sources, especially your key lights. Nothing breaks the surrealism of a good level design faster than seeing a nice brightly colored light in the middle of a room with no apparent source. In the real world, when we see light we know it has to come from some place – and your players will have the same expectation when they play through your level.

Unfortunately, good lighting generally isn’t something you can get right on the first try – sometimes lighting can take the most amount of time during the development phase of your map. Even after you get fairly decent at laying out initial lighting, usually you’ll spend plenty of time tweaking things to get them to look just right. Depending on what engine you’re mapping for and how fast it takes to compile the lightmaps (unless lighting is done in real time), tweaking can be a time-consuming process.

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