[TrevorJ]

Coming from a film background, it is clear there is a lot of conflation happening in these articles between light that 'behaves' like it would in the real world, and 'good' lighting. That is why you get quotes like in this article 'I light my scene by dropping a sun in'.

In reality, there is a whole lot more to lighting then simply having lights and materials that behave naturally. Sure, this gives you more realistic looking results out of the box, but it doesn't mean you don't have to sculpt and massage and tune your lighting to achieve the artistic result you want, especially for interiors, or scenes with characters in the foreground.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

The quote is about overcoming a technical constraint that forces laborious placing of secondary lights to restore behavior that you get for free in the physical world.

It's not claiming that design or art in lighting is unnecessary. It's freaking obvious that's necessary.

[chipsy]

To elaborate: Only about a decade ago, 3D game lights were almost uniformly "additive spheres" supplemented with some ambient or directional light. They didn't bounce or diffuse properly. Environments and characters each had separate lighting treatments, making the characters look like "cut outs" in most circumstances. Reflective surfaces were a special case feature, and most details could only be represented with a cleverly painted texture. Everything was faked, and as such, the art of a lot of these games had to hew closely to tech limitations.

Between then and now we've gradually gained enough GPU power to move towards a unified, real-time lighting model with most of the desired real-world properties. Although limits still exist, we can finally start addressing lighting primarily from the designer's perspective.

[gbrindisi]

> In reality, there is a whole lot more to lighting then simply having lights and materials that behave naturally.

For example? (genuinely curious)

[daenz]

Achieving a specific mood or "feel" for an environment requires someone who is very sensitive to lighting, color, and architecture, and who has knowledge of techniques to achieve certain looks.

For example, if you want an ominous feel to a cathedral, you need to know what light colors are more ominous than others, what direction of lighting (maybe bottom up, rather than from the top), what types of lights...many dim point lights? or single directional lights?, if light scattering through a medium like fog would look good, etc etc. And also keeping in mind functional aspects like, can the player still see items or things he needs to do, even with all of this specific lighting.

Another example might be that while lighting and materials might behave naturally, sometimes they still behave in undesireable ways. Suppose the angle of the sun reflected off of a reflective surface right into the player's face right while he was at a specific location where he needed to do something. If you can't move the surface, can you shift the light? Will that effect the scene much? Maybe now that you shifted the light, the rays of light that were going through a tree branch beautifully are not there any more.

[wmf]

Getting back to UE4, if its lights behave more like real-world lights it may allow game artists to translate real-world lighting knowledge into games or let them spend less time working around kinks in the engine.

[daenz]

Definitely true. We draw our experience on lights from the real world, so the closer an engine is to the real world, the faster the artists can prototype and test lighting setups.

[MartinCron]

As a still photographer who sometimes works with multiple off-camera lights (strobist-style) I would love to be able to experiment in software to see a very close approximation of how a setup would look.

[TrevorJ]

In all seriousness, go download a build of blender that has the GPU renderer built in. It is totally handy for what you are talking about. Hit me up via my email in my profile if you want help getting started, the interface can be a bit non-intuitive.

[daenz]

I'm not aware of any photographer-centric photorealistic 3d apps, but that sounds like a potential niche business! Might be worth exploring.

[jsprinkles]

There's a lot of untapped creativity from the masters of film and television production in gaming, because the skills don't map well. I'm definitely keen to see what happens to that situation once the engines get closer to simulating the real world. The possibilities are endless, since suddenly a great lighting director's skill set is much more valuable to a team working on a AAA title.

That isn't to say this doesn't happen now, just that it's only going to get better.

[sigkill]

Your post is very informative. Thank you for that.

If I may ask, don't you think decisions related to the "feel" of any game/entertainment device rests squarely on the shoulders of the art director?

I feel that statements such as that on ars is not meant to mock the artists but instead convey the message that "Hey programmers, next time the artists/director want these lights and this reflective properties, you can do it very quickly instead of hacking through messy code."

Now, personally what I think is going to happen is that with even more control, and lesser instances of programmers telling the artists "I could do that for you, but we're going to blow the next 6 month worth of budget for 5 people. Is that effect still important now?", artists are going to be able to come a step closer in realizing their intended vision.

[TrevorJ]

Yeah, I completely agree with you here. For me, I am a huge advocate for learning as much as we can from film in the production of games. If we look at the way technology is going, in 100 years I think we will see a huge blurring of the lines between games and film, there will be much much more cross-compatible skills and methods.

[TrevorJ]

You explained it very very well. In film it is par for the course to have hundreds of square feet of lighting gear crowded around the subject of the shot just to get that perfect look that the DP and director are going for.

[anigbrowl]

Natural light is boring, and often distracting. As a very simple example, I live in an old house and have windows broken into small square panels. For a scene where someone is looking through that window I would put a light outside to make a shadow on their face for dramatic effect, even if the sun was not really coming from that direction or if it was raining (which usually softens shadows). But if I was showing the same person looking back into the room, then the shadow on their back would be a distraction from what was inside the room, so I would soften the lighting or put a screen to limit the natural light, and fill in the darker areas of the room with a soft light.

Look at old film noir movies on TV, they have very exaggerated lighting for dramatic effect.Often you are reducing light to remove information from the scene, so that the viewer can focus on the dramatic subject.

[TrevorJ]

Even when they do shoot outdoors during the day in films, you have scrims, bounce cards, 12k lights and all manner of things to control the light. Also, DP's try to shoot exteriors during golden hour a few hours after sunrise or before sunset, to get softer and warmer light. If you have to shoot mid day, you try to either use a scrim or you pray for clouds to soften the harsh light.

[photon137]

Raytracing for one.

Also, none of the graphics engines really capture the wave-nature of light - intereference/diffraction etc. Radiosity captures a bit of this but from an intensity/energy point of view.

[photon137]

Oh sorry, I missed the point :) Artistic lighting - now that's a different thing!