The Art of Lighting for Games (2019)

Tools: Unreal Engine, Photoshop

In the Fall of 2019 I enrolled in CGMA's “The Art of Lighting for Games” course. This course demonstrated a practical approach to in-game/real-time lighting within the context of a production pipeline.

The topics I learned include the following:

Lighting considerations / reference/ mood
Sky light / Sky dome
Lightmass importance volume
Global Illumination
Runtime vs. pre-computed lighting (baked lighting)
Direct vs. indirect lighting
Post Processing Volume
Reflections (spherical and box reflection captures)
Warm vs. cool lighting
CLUT
Dynamic conditions (room vs. character lighting)
Physically-based Rendering (PBR)

With products such as NVIDIA’s RTX platform coming into view, the need for baked lighting is likely to be less in the years to come. However, I believe that understanding the fundamentals and gaining hands-on experience is extremely important.

(Original models and textures created by Unreal Technologies)