Just getting into the blog scene!
Here I'll share with you all how I created Visual Targets to assist environment artists on our team. These are images taken from our game, "Vestige," a first-person story-driven puzzle game set in a neo-Roman society.
Step one of the paintover process is to take the base screen shot of what the current level looked like (this was taken during the alpha version earlier this year).
Step two, I adjusted the tone and color of the level to bring out some difference in space and to emphasize the areas that are important to the player. Here you can still see some areas of the level have not yet been addressed; this step is dealing with lighting and overall areas that need to be blocked out.
Step three, I refine finer details. Things like the completely darkened out ceiling "crushers" (these were black because of some lighting complication the team was dealing with in UDK). I also addressed the room to the right, which needed to be toned down and needed to also be emitting light into the station. Small details, like the gate in the distance and some refined wall texturing in the arch and the subway walls, are added here. As it is now, it is still not done. The lighting seems a little off, I heard this referred to once as "Skittle Lighting," where it seems like you just picked cool colors but they are conflicting.
In this next step, I observe the picture as a whole, in black and white, to make sure the values are working overall. This step is repeated many times during the paintover process.
At this point, the values work. The colors still need to be reckoned with, however, and this was achieved by lowering the saturation and adjusting the color of the yellow lights to make them less contrasting the the rest of the lighting scheme.
Using this image, the team was able to change the look of the level in this area and similar areas to assist the way the player navigates the map. It also makes environments a lot prettier. Here is the station, now re-lit and textured for the final game:
Thanks for checking this out!
As the player moves from room to room in Vestige, how difficult is it to meld the different ambient lighting in different rooms?
ReplyDeleteOne of the main things we want to accomplish with lighting is to always lead the player towards the action! For instance a contrasting warm-lit point of a large area in a sea of cold lighting will draw the player towards that point of interest.
ReplyDeleteThe difficult part in blending these sort of lighting schemes is to not get too carried away with multiple or unbalanced light sources. A good method we utilized to help us was to pattern the rooms from dim to bright to dim again and so forth. In that way, the player could visually justify a sense of space and a sense of knowing where other spaces to explore may be.