Game Lighting and Color

Lightness and darkness are constantly battling for their place in the world. Who'll win? As a lighting artist, you decide. A mastery of lighting and color is the mark of the true game art professional. Lighting can set the mood in a dungeon, help a player notice a hidden power-up, make a character look menacing, and more.

Oy! Hand over the loot, guvnor.

In this six lesson hands-on course, you'll learn the lighting standards and techniques that shape today's game environments. You'll master the basic vocabulary, tools, and controls used to produce lighting effects in 2D and 3D imaging programs. Then you'll tackle the advanced shading and texturing techniques that can bring realism or depth to surfaces.

As you learn the applications of fundamental lighting and color technology in Photoshop and Maya, game art pro Jesse Brophy will keep you focused on the artistic, and technical aspects of game lighting: how color and lighting shapes the emotion of a character or scene, how it affects the player's experience, and how lighting requires tradeoffs in the design process.

Six challenging exercises will test your lighting technology skills and your creative approach. Critique and feedback from an expert instructor will help you add develop well-executed game art pieces for your portfolio or reel.

Jesse Brophy is a Senior Technical Artist in the game industry ... get bio

Simulate different lighting conditions and times of day using lighting techniques.

Apply basic three-point lighting techniques and use shadows and highlights to affect emotion.

Apply ambient, directional, spot, and point lights in Maya and modify their controls for position, intensity, and color.

Apply maps and raytracing to create accurate shadows.

Develop color schemes that are harmonious and set the mood of a game scene.

Choose colors based on how they interact with lighting and objects.

Develop and apply shaders that create realistically-lit surfaces with color, gloss, reflection, and other characteristics.

Design texture tiles and apply them to shaders to create more realistic surfaces.

Use different texture types and "normal maps" to create large amounts of surface detail.

Work around the limitations of game processors and memory using light maps and vertext colors.

Work within a game design team, referring the a design document to plan lighting needs.

Light a complete game scene including all objects within it using shaders, textures, and a design document.

LESSON 1 The Purpose of Lighting The many uses of light and color are explored in this introductory lesson. You'll learn how lighting can be applied and manipulated to define the shape and structure of objects in a game environment, and the techniques that help indicate time of day in outdoor scenes. Direction and intensity are introduced as methods for shaping the emotion of characters. In the exercise, you will build up your lighting resources and analyze the use of light in various 3D art pieces and photos.

LESSON 2 Components of a Light The range of lighting types you'll find in Maya and other 3D tools can be overwhelming. Lesson Two helps you make sense of ambient, directional, spot, and point lighting, as well as many of the controls that accompany each type. Working hands-on in Maya, you'll apply color, shadow, intensity and other attributes to modify the mood and depth of objects. After experimenting in the lesson, you'll choose and creatively apply lighting types in the exercise.

LESSON 3 The Power of Color Light and color go hand in hand in 3D video games, and color makes a powerful impact on the gameplay experience. This lesson begins with an overview of color as it applies to light and 3D environments, and how to select harmonious colors for your game scenes. The effects of warm and cool colors and other mood-defining color schemes are explored, and you'll apply them in the exercise, lighting and coloring a model.

LESSON 4 Shaders and Light At this stage, you'll have a good feel for controlling the color and light of a scene, so Lesson Four will take it to the next level of realism with the introduction of shaders. Shaders define how an object interacts with the lighting, and are critical to a life-like game environment. You'll explore the many ways light interacts with materials (such as through reflection, gloss, and falloff) and try them in Maya. You'll create and manipulate shaders in the exercise, developing renderings of a variety of materials.

LESSON 5 Using Textures to Manipulate Shaders Shaders alone do a lot to give a realistic feel to various materials, and adding textures to the mix gives them even more impact. You'll learn to create interesting texture tiles in this lesson and apply them to your shaders to create glossy surfaces, wrinkly skin, transparent areas, and more. You'll also learn about the size and quality compromise that is often encountered in texture design. In the exercise, you will develop creative texturing and shading for a variety of materials.

LESSON 6 A Look Behind the Curtain The world of video game lighting is not without its limitations, and you'll learn in this lesson how the pros approach constraints like memory limits and older platforms. A variety of techniques will be explored so you can work around these hurdles, and you'll look at new technologies that will shape the future of game lighting. Your final project will take you to a dungeon… where you'll create two complete lighting set-ups using everything you've learned in the course.