I have worked in the game industry for many years now. I have 12 credits to my name including Game of the Year AAA projects and VR. I’ve seen a lot of different lighting pipelines. Moving back and forth between this and the film world it has been amazing to be able to learn and integrate the best parts of each. Yes, I miss certain aspects of the film industry but the level of freedom and creativity is much greater in the game industry. The tools are really powerful these days and development continues to race along at an amazing speed.

I was at Midway Games in the early 2000s and had the chance to work with Ed Logg who co-developed Asteroids when it was still Atari. I’ve contributed from the early multi-media days back in the 90s all they way up through current AAA titles on the PS5. The technology has changed dramatically over the years but the importance of  making beautiful, compelling images remains. Working with all the super talented people, keeping up with all the changes and continually learning/growing is a good part of what I love about it all.

At PlayStation Visual Arts TLOU part 1 was something that we had started work a long time back. They’d originally thought of doing some episodic work in this world. This was the test bed for us when we were setting up ND’s pipeline on our network. Danny Braet had been onsite with ND a bit before I came on board. He showed me a lot of the ins and outs of the lighting pipeline. I worked in San Diego and between the two of us along with the engineers we’d chip away at things and get everything working in the environment and cinematic lighting.

Originally TLOU part 1 was going to be done all in house at PSVA. It ended up being a hybrid approach where work was shared with everyone at ND as well. I grew the lighting team hiring 10 more lighting artists along the way. Some were working on ND stuff while others were working with other studios like Insomniac, Santa Monica Studios and Bend to name a few. At one point I was keeping track of six projects while still doing lighting work as well. I was spinning a lot of plates to keep everyong supported.

In the process I stood up and took many environments up to Beta stage lighting handing them over to the new artists as we got them trained up. I held on to some fun stuff for myself to take to completion taking care of all the environment lighting, cinematic lighting, tech solutions and optimization. These are the images you can see below. ND’s pipeline is one of the most technically demanding tool sets I’ve run across over the years. It’s complex, assumes a lot of knowledge and takes a long time to master but allows for the creation of some of the best quality imagery in the industry. Ask me about the challenges of cube map layout, priority and blending especially on glass windows if you have a little time. 

I was originally brought on at PlayStation Visual Arts in San Diego to build a new lighting department. I had worked here before providing some hero lighting on cinematics for Uncharted 3 back in the day. Decided to wander off to London to work on some film stuff after this wrapped. PSVA continued working more closely with NaughtyDog to help them expand their capability. Michael Mumbauer got in touch. They wanted to add a lighting department into the mix. We worked on bringing their pipeline to our network to mirror and sync with all their tools, files and databases. Tools sometimes were comprised of legacy code that was specific to their setups and network of course. Taking the time to learn, setup, debug, document and write new tools to allow for full syncing was a lengthy process as you might imagine. The first real project we joined in on was TLOU part2. I worked onsite in Santa Monica during the week and then returned to San Diego to test, debug and ensure work would be possible there as well. Learning how to work offsite turned out to be pretty handy for all of us down the road when the pandemic came along.

I’m very proud that I was given the opening cinematics for the game. The very first thing you see after the logo is my work. They were quite pleased that I was able to drop right in already having a good working knowledge of the pipeline. Beyond doing just cinematic lighting I also had the opportunity to work on environment lighting on some of the standalone levels to help bring them along to be ready for the addition of the cinematic lighting. I’m so grateful for everyone there. I learned so much of their technical and creative process throughout the project.

This first shot showed up in marketing materials a fair amount. Simple shot but strong. Mari Kuwayama was the cinematic lighting lead at ND. She set this one up so is owed a good amount of credit for the direction. I picked it up and did the fine tuning on the lights, the environment work and optimization to bring it to final.

This one is part of the opening sequences of the game. I was always particularly impressed with ND’s eye shader. Notice the caustic refraction through the cornia. 

This was one of my more technically difficult shots. Two characters entertwined, working to get carefully sculpted light on both of them was a challenge. ND’s pipeline can handle a good number of shadow casting spotlights but they didn’t have light linking on this project. One of the most important things a lighter can take care with is to make sure each light is providing the maximum contribution to the image. No duplication or overlap. No waste. Each light should be considered and provide a necessary component to sculpting the image. Perfect balance is the goal. 

This shot is a good example of how you start with the in-game environment lighting. This is a playable space while the earlier ones are cinematic only spaces. These spaces need to work well for gameplay while still allowing enough bandwidth to add the additional rt lights to sculpt the light on the characters per shot. These type of shots are often more difficult from an optimization stand point. A good understanding of all the render settings and post process controls is vital to squeeze every little bit out of it.

More to come