Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

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FIGURE 3-3 Spotlight example FIGURE 3-4 Directional light example C H A P T E R 3 61 Lighting, Texturing, Particles, Effects, and Audio
Building Game Worlds 62 U L T I M A T E G A M E D E S I G N lighting might work in a stage scene, where character voicing is being emphasized, and the passive listener is asked to focus on the interchange of dialogue. It doesn’t work well in an active game environment. You don’t need to make players stumble in the dark constantly in order to transfer mood and achieve your lighting goals. If you don’t have lighting contrasts and variety (light to dark) to support the mood based on level actions, areas, goals, and scenarios, you’re probably not using lighting to its best advantage anyway. So, how do you find the perfect balance for your level lighting? Perhaps you want sections that are very dark, with only soft lighting, and sections that have more vivid lighting. This usually is accomplished by finding the right balance between your local ambient lights and your point lights. I’ve found that by setting the ambient global lights slightly lower than seems appropriate and then building the light back in using point lights and spotlights, I can achieve consistent results in reaching dramatic lighting. Lighting Falloff For visual effect, you will often want to simulate light dissipation as it leaves a light source. We all know that light fades as it leaves a source, commonly called falloff. Controlling light falloff is simply a matter of controlling how fast or how slow light will dissipate from a source (your light in the scene). If you want immediate falloff, you won’t let light leave the source for very long. If you want it to dissipate slowly away from the source, you’ll adjust the intensity of the falloff range. Falloff is commonly controlled for floor lights pointed upward along a wall surface and for streetlamps. Three Sample Lighting Setups Let’s take a look at how to approach lighting for three sample setups: the somber castle, the happy forest, and the scary forest. First, consider how you might light up a somber castle. As a starting point for lighting a room in a somber castle, I would factor in one global or ambient light and two spotlights. Accent the ambient light with heavy purple (RGB: 128,128,255) to make the room look cold. Aim the spotlights in each corner, pointing in opposite directions: one pointing up, one pointing down. If the ceiling is high enough, you can imply that the light is coming from a number of sources in the scene. Figure 3-5 shows our setup results. You could experiment with this simple process to light all the other rooms in your castle. A starting point in lighting a section of the happy forest would include one or two bright ambient lights tuned for distance (in other words, experiment with the distance and height between these global lights over the section you’re lighting). Balance the color of these ambient lights with large doses of orange and purple. We want what I call “cereal box” sunlight—warm, magical, and glowing. (As a visual reference point, recall Gandalf’s arrival at the Shire in the horse-drawn cart in The Fellowship of
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A BOUT THE AUTHOR Tom Meigs is a ga
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Brandon A. Nordin Scott Rogers Wend
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Building Game Worlds x U L T I M A
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Building Game Worlds xviii U L T I
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2 THE game design process begins by
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Building Game Worlds 4 U L T I M A
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Building Game Worlds 112 U L T I M
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130 Building Game Worlds 130 U L T
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136 SCRIPTING in games gives develo
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166 ONCE your game environment has
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Building Game Worlds 174 174 U L T
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188 A whole new avenue for games ha
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216 ANOTHER new content horizon for
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238 THERE is a wide and growing ran
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266 AT some point in your skills gr
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274 Building Game Worlds U L T I M
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Building Game Worlds 278 FIGURE 11-
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286 THIS appendix includes useful r
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296 MANY types of software tools we
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304 TO assist you to further define
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310 I’VE gathered together a few
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322 AS a point of reference and as
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Building Game Worlds 336 Baseball s
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Building Game Worlds 340 Geometry a
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Building Game Worlds 346 crowd, 146
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