Level Design Workshop: Blockmesh and Lighting Tips

[Music] hello everyone alright let's get started thanks for coming quick reminders please silence your cell phones and no video recording this hour-long talk is split into two halves by me and Robert yang so we have separate evaluation forms if you didn't get beeped on the way in if you stayed from the last talk if you can go get beeped that'd be great you'll get the evaluation form please fill him out because your feedback is important to us my name is David shaver and I'm a game designer at Naughty Dog before that I was at respawn entertainment show games in Zynga I've been in industry for almost 11 years and worked on lots of different games the most recent you can see here I started out as a game programmer and switched to a game and level design years ago this very workshop helped me realize my love of design and helped with that transition now this talk is about how to

guide players naturally with your level layout and how to minimize the reliance on HUD markers and forced camera moves and all that stuff it's the talk that I wish someone would have given me an ears ago because it really would have saved a lot of time speaking of saving time this talk is jam-packed so this overviews quick part one guiding players with block mesh layouts with me and part two Robert will be talking about level lighting let's go first up let's get all on the same page what the heck is block mesh well at Naughty Dog we call levels built with simple geometry and textures block mesh unfortunately our industry hasn't arrived at a single term at this yet it's actually they also call it gray box and white box and all kinds of things mostly I prefer block mesh because it includes color and lighting which are very important when playtesting layouts since they help guide players also handing off colored block meshes to your artists make it a lot easier to communicate the kinds of textures and colors you had in mind green floor it's probably grass brown it's probably dirt now let's look at a

common level design process at a game studio first you need to establish the context and constraints of your level this includes things like the environment type the time of day location in the story available character abilities and Titus all that stuff you should decide on the gameplay and narrative beats - once you have your requirements and beats dive right into building rough version of the entire level so that you can get a sense of pacing and scale be sure to stub in those gameplay and narrative beats to get something playable quickly and then watch other people play it there's no need for a formal play test or anything you just grab anybody because the feedback that you get from them is gonna change a block mesh repeat this iteration loop until you basically run out of time and once you run out of time your layouts locked and you hand it off to the rest of the team to make it look amazing but your job isn't done yet your task at this stage is to ensure that your design goals mesh with their artistic goals so keep playtesting and work with your artist to ensure that it still plays great with the real art now it's worth

noting that every studio has a different process but this core iteration loop is universal so now let's get to the block mesh tips now our game director Kurt told me that tips wasn't a strong enough word for how important these are so I'm gonna rename them now to guidance principles so first up we have affordance one of the most powerful ways to guide players is by using affordances which are properties of an object that define its possible uses and make clear how it should be used a classic example is a door handle just by looking at a push bar or a pull handle you into it whether or not to push or pull the door as you approach ladders afford climbing edges also afford climbing ramps afford jumping off or smashing through a vent and Wolfenstein 2 affordances depend on your game rules because that's what they're communicating to the player so for our game designers affordance is a great way to communicate to the player what they can never interact with or where they can go players will learn what is interactive and it will attract

them towards these affordances consistent color and shape establish a trust contract with players who used these to learn your game rules you should ensure that all of your affordances work consistently throughout the game or it breaks that trust contract which will cause player frustration you should also include affordances in your block mesh phase it'll help guide players where you want them to go let's see what it looks like so in this block mesh it's not clear where the player should go next sure the ladder affords climbing up the little tower but then what jump to the cliff dive in the water what if we had some affordances it becomes clear where to go the boards on the roof afford jumping to the cliff while the edge grabs on the cliffs afford climbing of course this example of is tailor-made for uncharted but the game same concepts will apply to your traversal mechanics it may seem silly to add them so early but trust me it makes a world of difference in how your play tests go and it doesn't take that much effort and one more thing

ensure you these affordances are use consistent shape and color follow the game metrics and you empower your team with this information they could even be prefab objects that the whole team can use next tip denying affordance while affordances are important is showing the player what they can interact with showing them what they cannot interact with is also important this is denying affordance and it prevents player frustration and guides them now you can't just disable a ladder or place a invisible wall I mean you can but you shouldn't because it's frustrating to players so what you need to contextualize why you can't use the affordance by adding clearly visible things that say can't use this or don't go there also make sure the reason for denied affordance is clear in your block mesh at Naughty Dog we record a plate when a play tester tries to jump and grab something that they can't grab we call these bad jumps and overlay them as red spheres in the game so that we can

identify problem areas often we'll find something that looks Klima bulb it isn't supposed to be so we'll cover it with foliage or something and after the next play test those bad jumps will be gone like sanding down a piece of wood this process makes the levels play smoother here's an example of using spiky shapes and breaking up the horizontal edge to deny climbing affordance even though the window is within climbing range you still can't grab it because it's visually blocked notice how this isn't contextualized to the environment with bricks and rebar this is important for games grounded in reality for games not so grounded you can get away with a lot and that's okay just find the right tone in context for your world to make it feel natural and still deny affordance now let's see some black mesh let's say that we want the player to go through the window on the right which is busted open the left window is covered with a bush and the and the front porch window and door are blocked with boards most players will glance at

this house and go right for that window and a play test the intended way forward is open while the rest of the entrance affordances are denied next tip shaped language establishing a consistent shaped language communicates affordance and guides players climbing edges and uncharted are always horizontal and flat as a player you learn this visual language of Ford's plot climbing and you can spot it easily also people tend to have emotional associations with certain types of primitive shapes which is even common across cultures we can use this to our advantage to guide players toward or away from certain shapes round shapes tend to be viewed as non-threatening there's nothing to stab you with rectangular shapes are viewed as stable and trustworthy like a shelter and diagonal shapes are viewed as aggressive and dangerous like a spear now let's take a look at a screenshot from uncharted The

Lost Legacy and highlight the shapes as you can see the spiky shapes feel a little bit uncomfortable possibly causing you to want to avoid those areas the round areas aren't a threat and they actually provides stealth and the square shapes our combat cover or buildings nice and stable all of this subtly guides the player to the buildings now let's see what it looks like in black mesh let's say we want the players to go to the right and they're being chased so exploration will wreak pacing the path sort of leads there but some players may veer to the left so how can we gently nudge them to the right first let's add some spiky trees and some other pine trees that angle toward the goal then we'll add some round bushes finally we'll add a small building and I'm not gonna lie at this point I kind of feel like this but with a lot less hair um alright let's highlight their shapes we just added the spiky shapes say danger and they discourage going there this the square building implies hey stability is

this way the round stepping stones on the ground act as breadcrumbs to that stability and the round bushes kind of act as bumpers into frame the place base of course none of this prevents the player from going wherever they want it just gently guides them where they should go next tip color language when you're trying to establish a consistent visual language in your affordances shape is only half of it you also need a consistent color as well adding color provides valuable context for an otherwise barren block mesh it also adds depth if you're making a 3d game coloring also speeds up collaboration with your team because at a glance they can get it without explanation is the ground supposed to be dirt lava water now Naughty Dog is notorious for using contrasting colors to draw the eye to where you should go here we have a break a low sign and rail and it subtly lists the player know where to put the plank most people won't question why only one rail is yellow

they'll just remember that they intuitively knew where to go here we have white climb above edges and here are some more edges but wait these are green I thought you said to be consistent well it's not a single color that's important it's using consistent color and shapes in the context of the environment try to blend them into the environment so it looks natural but still stands out let's see how color can aid your block mesh here we have a gray box it's not really clear where the player should go or where they even can go affordances are gray and they're hard to see also what kind of environment is this a desert an icy planet first let's add color to the affordances so that you can see them in the path forward sort of but we're still missing the context what is this place you know everything blends together boom we add color to the top of the blocks and suddenly you're in a grassy mountainous area with water down below as you can see adding color to your

block mesh helps contextualize the to the players and a teammates and to further ground this on earth let's add some props okay now color is important but it shouldn't be the only thing that you rely on because some players are colorblind you should combine color with other techniques like unique shapes using content and using contrasting color values rather than hues bonus points if you can get colorblind play testers or teammates to help identify problems and make your game more accessible next tip landmarks there she is that's our building there's the tower alright there's the bridge that's our way out of here ever wonder why game characters spend so much time pointing at things in the distance well that's because their landmarks and they're great way to orient players in your world a landmark is basically just a big object that can be seen from far away and from different vantage points if used correctly players will see this object over and over as they get closer

to it to let them know they're headed in the right direction landmarks also act as a goal for the player to work toward they're also called wienies if you want to know more about that just google Disney and weenies don't worry it's safe for work probably depends if your safe search is off alright check this out Zelda the breath of the wild really goes nuts with the landmarks and just this one shot there are several visible all in a row and they're not overlapping one another they also have unique silhouettes so you don't confuse them which is also a great tip try to have unique silhouettes for things in your game so the players can distinguish them at a glance all right block mesh time let's add a landmark to this block mesh man it's pretty basic but you can have a huge it can have a huge impact on drawing the player toward a certain direction if I'm working with a landmark I like to edit first and then build the level backwards from there that way I can always see it in the distance and shape the level accordingly next tip openings attract caves doors

etc they all seem to attract people toward them these openings often lead to a refuge space which psychologically feels safe openings also have an air of mystery about them and people want to see what's inside this attraction happens in the real world with hobbies like spelunking and urban exploration here in titanfall to a ramp affords jumping to a nicely lit opening that begs to be explored this underwater opening lets you know that there's something beyond it if you swim for it it even works in block worlds as soon as I saw this I went right for it doors and archways also draw you inside even though an archway may not have a roof above it when adding openings to block mesh it's important to have a different different colors for interior and exterior walls here we have a cool white exterior and a warm yellow interior this helps players read depth in your block mesh if they're the same color it's hard to tell that it's even an opening also communicate this design intent to your artist to ensure that

they know that this is an entrance and that it needs to stand out next tip gates and valves terrible jokes all right no not those gates and valves the kind of wake of way more money we want the level design kind gates stop progress until some sort of conditions are met you've killed all the enemies you've moved the debris out of the way etc valves are the opposite they let players move forward and then they slam the door shut behind them so they can't get back track in this scenario we want the player to enter the combat space and be trapped until combats over we have a valve into the space and then a gate at the other end blocking them so they can't leave once they enter the gates and valves reduce the possibility space of the world to just the combat zone also there's less mentally to keep track of so players can focus on a task at hand it may look like this is only useful in linear games but open-world games can use it too with scenarios like arena battles the Halo series did a great job of having big open levels that gated in valve players

when needed now gates are pretty straightforward there's something in your way and you need to clear it so I'll focus on Valve's which can be a little more nuanced in this Valve example you drop down and you can't get back up a fairly famous valve is in Super Metroid we're an entire chunk of level acts like a valve at some point the player falls down this really long shaft and there's no way back up they're stuck and the vast possibility space of the game is reduced to a tiny portion as seen on the map in this space they find two critical items the high jump boots and ice beam and they can they learn to freeze enemies and then jump off of them so that they can use it to escape the shaft the shaft that was once a valve has now become a gate that needs to be overcome given the entire world to

explore they may have never discovered this ability next tip leading lines leading lines are a composition technique where lines in the environment draw the eye to a specific place in the scene in this photo the logs dry the eye up and into the frame to finally rest on the house in games these are often things like roads and pipes and cables and all sorts of stuff here in titanfall 2 we wanted the player to focus on this door and not miss the reveal of a new enemy pipes and floor grates form leading lines to the door and when you get close a stalker rips the door open for a grand reveal here in the black mesh is a hallway with a t-junction at the end let's say you wanted the player to go to the right again right now it's a coin toss they may turn left see it seal off door and turn around or they may smoothly go to the right and enter the next area by adding some leading lines though we can draw their attention to the right and increase the chances they'll go there pipes on the walls and rug guide the player down the hallway

but the pipes on the left stop while the pipes on the right go over long around the corner drawing the eye the caution cones break up the red line of the rug going left and to go over the top we had a yell a big bright yellow cable that hugs the right side and goes along around the corner just some simple shapes but it can have a huge impact on smooth navigation in your play tests next tip pinching pinching basically means your layout funnels the player to a specific spot you accomplish this by blocking off areas and angling shapes to naturally flow to that spot it's a it's good for redirecting players to a specific area and it's also a great way to set up a cool reveal like view of a landmark without forcing the camera to look at it if you pinch them to a specific spot the camera will be naturally pointed at the thing you want them to see wrong side okay yeah of course all of this is completely depends on your mobility mechanics it's much easier to do this in a game where players are stuck on the ground than in

something like titanfall where they're flying all over the place let's look at an example here the buses and cars are angled to a specific spot which you can see highlighted here walking down the street the shapes naturally bring you to the end and they pin of the pinch which faces the way forward let's see it in action in this video the pinch lines up a perfect shot of the hospital in the distance which is your goal and the tunnel that takes you there next tip framing a composition another technique borrowed by from photography by framing your subject be it a landmark a big enemy or cave opening you draw attention to it if you'd like to learn more just Google some photography composition techniques you'll find lots of stuff this one's really useful when combined with pinching to set up an important

reveal in the level after you pinch the player to a specific spot perfect perfectly frame the object for maximum effect let's see it in action as you saw the players naturally pointed at the dam and due to good framing it was the dominant thing on screen also a side tip people's eyes are drawn to detail and the dam is very detailed all of this with just some layout and no force camera moves alright next tip breadcrumbs all yes breadcrumbs lead the player a little piece at a time to the goal they can be almost anything chunks of stuff on the ground pick up items enemies lit areas etc it's usually better to add breadcrumbs to your block mesh after the early play tests because they can hide fundamental layout guidance problems but if you still need them after a few revisions don't feel bad about adding them in this example

the bits on the fence and roof create a visual stepping stones to the ledge in destiny to these panels guide the player into the tunnel now if your game has pickups there a classic way to breadcrumb players around the level like how many times have you played a mario game and the coins led you to a new area pickups are also great for letting players know they're on the right path in a cluttered or maze-like environment this one's placed next to an area that you can duck under which some players forget they can even do so it's subtly hints yep you're going the right way so to go back to this house let's say only half the players during our last play test went into the house and the other half got lost let's add some rocks and boards as breadcrumbs leading to the window notice how the boards are angled toward the window creating leading lines you can also sprinkle these breadcrumbs at open-world areas to lead players to interesting things like the panels in the Destiny example next tip textures you can use textures to subtly or

sometimes obviously point the way to a goal these can be just about anything arrows scrapes on the wall signs etc here and Uncharted The Lost Legacy script textures on the wall communicate affordance that you can shimmy here this example leads to a secret area and a collectible so it's a good example that you don't need to do this for just the main path here in uncharted 4 these tire tracks on the rock communicate affordance that you can drive here now when I played this game I didn't the tire tracks and I got lost I didn't work on this game what I worked on the next one once I noticed the tire tracks though the rest of it driving went totally smoothly signs literally point the way to the hospital which is also your goal these textures are often some of the last things added when making a level so it doesn't seems like it's not really going to help your block mesh phase but guess what you don't need to wait for an artist to Adam you can cheat and you can build them out of blocks mesh for your play tests here I've added an arrow and

a sign to point the way and these scratch marks lead into the alley indicating something heavy was dragged back there and the best part these are all just block mesh labeling rooms and areas could be super helpful for both linear and open games if you're building a school for example having labels like gym and cafeteria provide valuable context and signposts as your players explore I totally hit next all right here I've pulled away from pulled this away from the wall a bit so you can see that it's just a bunch of blocks this stuff only takes a couple minutes to do and it works wonders for your play tests and also to communicate with your artist where you think signage might go and I'm not going to lie this one is so easy and simple it obvious it kind of blew my mind when I learned it all right next hip movement movement grabs the eye and the players attention this could be anything that fits your game big scripted moments bird sparks buddies enemies and even just something flapping

in the breeze also make good use of the direction of the movement the players I will follow the movement and it can draw an invisible line right to where you want them to go in this example I'm about to show the birds draw your attention to the left where there's this open trailer door and the trailer door is also banging in the wind both of these things kind of subtly let you know like hey maybe you should check out what's inside and the dead body totally helps to of course adding movement in the block mesh phase is highly dependent on your game and engine if you can know try to include them in your play tests maybe not in the first ones but definitely before you lock it down and you don't have to get fancy you can have basic cubes just looping through the sky as a placeholder for birds now adding movement is also super useful as a

bandage late in development when the level is basically done but players are still getting lost since the level itself is done you can script in some movement to help but don't rely on it though like try to solve the player guidance problems in the black mesh phase last tip light and God raise a ka light rays or Sun beams light and God rays are useful for guiding players to a goal people are naturally drawn to light sources and godrays point a line right at the goal this is important even in the blocked mesh phase the Naughty Dog lighting artists begin very early in this example the two lit areas are breadcrumbed goals first the one with the bad guy in the middle and then the one at the top right here we have some God rays coming out of a window they take up more screen space so you're more likely to notice them and they draw the leading line straight to the window which is also the exit also notice that swordfish it is totally drawing an arrow right at the window so that's not lighting but you know textures better so since my talk is about player guidance these light tips focus on that robert's

upcoming talk is about lighting a level so let's start wrapping it up but first a bonus tip ah the squint test so simple and majestic but what is it well it's basically an easy way to see what stands out in your level step one squint your eyes and look at your game step two things will be blurry but what stands out from that blur a litter of right yellow truck the things that are standing out are the things that players are going to notice first so step three adjust your block mesh in your lighting so that the things that are popping out are the things that you want them to see and here's a fun quote Mattias gave me my professor you to say that squinting can replace four years of art school thanks for the okay let's see it in action before we wrap up here's a shot from titanfall to squint your eyes and take note of what stands out go ahead I'll give you a [ __ ] minute I'm squinting very good I'm just going to you got it okay good you probably

noticed the yellow walls and the waterfall and the orange cave opening the yellow walls are wall running paths that draw leading lines straight to the cave and the waterfall uses movement and sound to grab your attention and it also helps frame the cave openings attract and the cave is lit a totally different color from everything else in the scene okay it's time to wrap it up but wait there's more I want to tell you about hashtag block tober last October Michael Barkley at Naughty Dog tweeted this but in his awesome Scottish accent that I am NOT going to attempt what's up level designers level block outs are art hashtag block Tober should be a thing the response was overwhelming everyone from triple-a devs hobbyists participated now I bring this up because it's important to demystify game development and encourage people to make things so many people didn't realize that the self-deprecating crap that they were making looked exactly like their favorite games early in development and they were super inspired to keep going October's happening again this year and my created this Twitter account to

collect everything people make so follow it and get started now on your block meshes for blocked over if you like this talk check out these other links and books if you make multiplayer maps be sure to check out Elizabeth talk from last year there's no need to write these down I'll put all this up on my website after GDC it has some bonus tips at the end hopefully you found this talk useful and I'll see your block meshes in block Tober thank you [Applause] okay hi this is the second half of the talk of invisible intuition I'm Robert yang I'm a professor at the NYU Game Center if you want to know more what we're about come visit us on the expo floor starting Wednesday and David just talked a lot about black mesh and gray boxing I'm not great boxing sorry black mat just block meshing and geometry and in this talk I want to focus kind of more on the lighting side of things because David just said now

you dog they actually start lighting really early so this is also kind of a dimensional level design that I think a lot of people are scared of and want to avoid doing and you shouldn't be scared about it so a little bit about me I'm mostly known from my gay culture videogames kind of get around a pause for gay sex okay don't stop stop it's not about that perverts this talk is kind of more about maybe how I like my gay videogames maybe a little bit and it's it's okay if you're not cool enough to put gay sex in your game but you know even if you're a straight person you can put lighting in your game baby so in this talk we're gonna it's kind of aimed more for beginners and kind of intermediate level designers although even if you're like

an experienced level designer maybe you don't think about lighting as much as you could so maybe it'll still be helpful for you we'll start with a kind of more general discussion of lighting and then kind of get more and more specific as the talk progresses until we end with how to light a level with like a more specific suggested workflow that you can do in unity or unreal or whatever you use so first let's start with a brief history of light a very brief and simple history of light might start with the Sun right the Sun is really great let's give it up no for the Sun although it's going to rain a lot I'm told so you won't see much Sun in the next few days there's also you know fire controlled burning and gas lamps incandescent light bulbs with filament and run current through the filament there's also a stronger focus these days on energy efficient light sources like fluorescent lighting or LED lighting is also coming more common and it's I think

it's very tempting to think of this as a story about technology and progress and like older light sources becoming obsolete or something but that's not exactly true and I don't think that's exactly accurate like the the light bulb do not make the Sun obsolete right like you still like going outside and playing in the Sun or whatever you do in the Sun I wouldn't know I'm a game developer but the LED did not make the fire obsolete right you'll go to a restaurant and maybe tonight and have a nice candlelit dinner or something and the flickering candle it's really nice when that's actual fire not a one of those weird LED flickering things right so as a society I think we still use fire as a light source not necessarily as like a task light source where you like write letters by candlelight or something but you know

it's still in our birthday candles or campfires fire hasn't disappeared but our culture around fire has changed fire used to be common and now it's kind of more like a special occasion kind of thing but it's still here in civilization so each of these light sources means something different and makes a space feel different and I urge you to pay attention to the different moods and atmospheres these different light sources of VOC and today contemporary lighting design has been kind of heavily standardized and industrialized if you're a lighting designer and you're shopping for light fixtures or womyn airs as they're called in Europe it's very common to on the left right there that's like a picture of like a lighting catalog and the lighting catalog gives you all these different stats so you can kind of predict what the light will do and there's also usually often like a chart in that lower left I've blown up the chart on the

right there and that's a light distribution curve chart and that kind of shows you how much light that light source or light fixture is gonna throw at every given angle so notice this light bulb with that light distribution chart on the right it's kind of shaped like a heart a little bit and has like a crease at the top well that makes sense right because the light socket is on top it's not going to throw a light through the light socket that doesn't make sense so it's mainly throwing light downwards into the right so now you know how to read a light distribution chart it's pretty easy so this is how real-life lighting design quantifies and standardizes the physics of light but in videogames light is often much messier than this so now I want to talk a little bit about what is game lighting and what do we mean by that light is a complex phenomenon that's hopefully elegant with

like a unified theorem and all that and all these phenomena like reflections occlusion translucent shadows all those happen in real life like for free so to speak but in video games lighting is like a bunch of crap in a box we don't it's just a bunch of random systems that we like hack and tune together and we throw that crap in the videogame and then pray it will look okay in the end so it's not a beautiful elegant system it's just a bunch of random stuff and to give you an idea of all that random stuff right in any given game engine there's different cascading shadow Maps there's refraction shaders there's caustics there's fog there's glow sprites each your screen space ambient occlusion bloom all these different things are all kind of representing one system but in a video game it's like 20 different systems right and we kind of just turn them on and turn them off on like a case-by-case

basis right so when you play a video you may be when you go in this room that's when they turn on some screen space reflection and then when you go in this other room that they turn off screen space reflection to like save on framerate and optimizing stuff and again from a business perspective that means zero cents right the idea that you can turn off shadows in like real life makes no sense because that would just like you should go see a doctor if that happens right that's not good so again video games we rely on a lot of this like piecemeal approach of all this random stuff together so in this talk I'm not going to be talking about a lot of those effects I'm gonna be focusing on what I view as the fundamentals of lighting in level design which are basically these four basic light types directional light spotlight ambient light and point light so let's say you're mocking up a level in unity or

something and you don't have any lights going on it's just a dark level no lights there yet and I just have a bunch of blocks there so first you might add some ambient light ambient light is a gardening like default amount of light you might add to a scene its refers to the whole scene its global and you do that to make sure those shadows in your levels aren't pitch-black because in real life very few things are just pitch-black like that unless you're in like a really dark cave or something there's always like a little bit of light bouncing around everywhere so ambient light is kind of meant to simulate that a little bit but notice when we add ambient light that doesn't really help us read the shapes there are anything it's still very flat right you still can't really see the shapes that well but you can just distinguish the silhouette so that's when you might add another light source so here's a directional light directional light is a

global light source it illuminates the entire scene at once from one given direction and it usually doesn't matter where you position a directional light depending on what tool you're using and now with the directional light you can read the shapes much more clearly right because you add that directionality component to it now and notice how everything pops out in games we usually use directional light usually for like sunlight or maybe moonlight or something then we also have a spotlight the scene is set at night maybe you want to add some street lights for a street light you might want to use a spotlight a spotlight throws of light in a cone shape in a given direction and from a given position so here I'm using a spotlight as a down light to emphasize this walkable floor area instead of emphasizing something else and lastly I want to talk about the point light the point light throws light in every direction some toolsets might call this an omnidirectional light or you can call an omni light for short which makes it

sound really cool any light but you imagine a point light as this like invisible ball of light that's just washing everything nearby with light so a point light I think is usually really good at drawing attention to a focal point because it ends up creating kind of this hotspot effect a little bit in contrast with a spotlight right it's not always clear where the spotlight is shining from especially if it's a spotlight like a floodlight shooting light across and in practice you should try to use all four lighting types at once because they all can work together really well ambient helps bring up the shadows directional light helps make those background buildings pop and helps guide the main mood of the scene then you also have a spotlight highlighting an area then you also have a point light highlighting the street light and again all this stuff works together helps create depth it helps push like a background in a foreground for your scene and that's

good and with these light sources I would argue that they form like a complete domain of lighting tools so stretching the gamut from like a global light source that affects everything to a local light source that only affects nearby things or a light source that shines in one direction or all directions I feel like it's like a complete domain kind of so the con again that's why every 3d engine or toolset usually has these light sources so now we should talk a little bit about why we should use these light sources and I'm gonna talk about a lighting theory called three-point lighting which is a very common lighting form of lighting design theory that's a very common in film and photography so if you have a background in that so seem very familiar to you basic idea of three-point lighting is that you have

three different light types and here's a diagram that hopefully explains some of it in that top left we have a combined like composite of three different light types but we can also break down what each light is doing into like a separate Channel so that's what those other three smaller pictures are doing and in the top right you have a key light the key light is kind of like your brightest light source and it kind of sets the dominant lighting angle and mood for your scene or picture image then in the bottom left we have a fill light a fill light helps brought brighten up the shadows kind of like the ambient light we were talking about before it helps fill in the darker parts usually you want this at a lower intensity than your key light then in lower right we have the rim light and it's also sometimes called a backlight or a hair light depending on what you're doing and it illuminates kind of your silhouette to help pop it out from the background very feeling otherwise the hair might end up

or the top of the head might be blending in with the background so notice they do some specular and stuff on top right like that and a very common three-point kind of setup might end up looking a little bit like this you have a key light and fill light usually kind of opposing angles you usually don't want them following the same direction in position because then that kind of defeats the purpose so usually you want fill and key to be at least different angles or in positions and in film and photography there's also often the background light that optional light right there the background light helps brighten the background to help get rid of any awkward shadows that come from the key and fill remember in real life they can't just turn off shadows for the key and fill they actually have to have like another light to get rid of that shadow and if you basically watch any movie you can kind of breakdown any given film shot along these lines and try to see what

all the different light sources are doing so these are some examples from a blog called lighting pixels you can see there's a key light a fill light and a rim light on that left the key light is kind of coming from that top left of that image so then it kind of feels like sunlight kind of and everything in that image is kind of evenly illuminated too so it seems very readable meanwhile on the right there key light is not coming from the top right the key lights coming from below which means it's probably not sunlight unless these people are like hanging upside down that's probably not sunlight right so to me that means it's more like an artificial light source maybe like a nice candle or something and when that candle is illuminating from bama's face I feel like that sets up a very different mood in the right image versus the left image right the right image feels kind of more intimate and maybe even like romantic I don't know what movie that's from maybe maybe they're breaking up or having a divorce

I don't know some some [ __ ] is going down in that right image right but in the left image zero [ __ ] right it's very very nice and safe and it's really important to note that with three point lights lighting it's referring to three types of light sources you don't always need to place three lights in every scene so for example in that film shot on the left there's only two light sources there a key light and a rim there's no fill and the right side of his face is left in shadow and that's okay if that's what you want to do with your lighting and that's the mood you want to create same thing in that right image there's only one light source just one key to help kind of emphasize I think the extreme close-up in intimacy of that shot so again it's just about what you want to do with your lights and what you want your lights to say so here's another example I'd main unity say you want to like light this honky

dude with three-point night theory the way I good him I had a key like kind of grazing him a little bit so I could like catch some muscle definition and I had the fill light kind of a little off angle from there because I still wanted to maintain the keep I wanted to soften how the shadows were hitting him if you see in the right that's a variant without the fill like and without the fill light I felt like his face was too much in shadow and I couldn't read what was going on and if you're like a beginner level design I would say you should most beginners forget to do the fill part and if you're starting out you should err on the side of more filled and less fill and and then let's say I have a rim light also kind of picking out the the right side of his face there and help separating that from the background so you can read his features better and as for implementation here I'm actually using three directional lights in unity but just with the layer

mask set to just one layer just for that object so it ends up being not that expensive with you use the culling masks and unreal you can use a feature called light channels which kind of does the same thing and it's super useful for isolating light sources for objects but most beings end up doing just maybe one light source technically with the key light might be your main directional light but your fill might be ambient or sphere of harmonics probes and then your rim light might be Fresnel and reflection and stuff in your shader but I think there's one big problem with three point light theory for games especially in regards to level design and that is the fact that film and photography have a very tightly controlled camera perspective but in video games we often give camera control to the player so if you were looking at this hunky dude and then you walk around and admire the back of this hunky dude

now the key light is in a key light anymore because the viewing angle has changed now my rim light is like a key light now my fill light isn't visible or something I don't even know what's going on in that image anymore so one big problem here is that we can't really know where the player is going to see this object which will affect how we compose our lighting this is why a lot of 3d games I think end up vomiting rim shaders and Fresnel effects everywhere because they can't predict where the player is going to be looking at this object so they just spam Fresnel and rim everywhere so that there oh there's always some rim action going on but you know that should be your last resort let's try to be more subtle than that and I would argue the way you can be more subtle is to think about how your level layout will facilitate the viewing angles for your subjects and you then you can light accordingly and use that as a framing device so your level layout

is a lighting tool you can suggest a view or a frame a certain V composition just by having the player move through a hallway and that'll suggest an angle for them that's also why you need to do a little bit of block out in block meshing before you do some Lighting's so that you have an idea of where the players going to be going and lastly I want to end with this section how to light a level and I want to walk you through some steps that I would recommend you take with your own levels if you're starting out this example be an unreal but you can do it in any engine basically so first you do your block out or gray box or whatever you want to call it with just some basic real-time light if you're doing some light baking you don't want to do it at this stage because your levels constantly changing you don't want to waste your time spending an hour lighting a room and then you end up

deleting that room or something then you've wasted your time so right here is when I'm recommend you just use some basic real-time light and not worry about the lighting so much for unreal I like switching it using stationary lights for this and I also like enabling a setting called for snow precomputed lighting which will help you not worry about light mapping and like that light map baking and stuff and that's in the world settings in the Unreal editor and in unity I like you seeing real-time lights and I disable the auto generate lighting checkbox so that you're not constantly sitting and waiting and stopping for the light Maps to bake although I hear the light Maps faster now or something I don't know step two now you want to set up your main mood your big mood in your scene and to do that you want to set up your global lights so remember ambient and directional those apply to your whole entire game world so now's me the time to set that

up before you worry about smaller stuff and here you can see I have a bunch of sunlight flooding in from those middle windows right here and I want to set up the main mood of this level with like a big sunny Sun filled area and to do that I need to set up the indirect light bounces especially for a directional eye or sunlight if you want something to feel like sunlight you should be paying attention to your indirect light bounce settings and in unity that would be going to your light settings and in unreal that would involve going your world settings and adjust the light mass section of the world settings and also look at the sky lights actor and your unreal scene and if you're not working with global illumination or light map baking for whatever reason then the next best thing is to hand place like invisible faint point lights everywhere if you're like working on a game like like I heard there's a rumor that Fallout 4 did not have global illumination so they had to place faint

point lights forever to like simulate and fake all the light sunlight bouncing everywhere so you can totally do that as well and unity I like switching those lights to not important so that they don't contribute to specular stuff and in unreal I like increasing the minimum roughness on those flights that they don't create hot spots in your reflections step three after you've kind of set up the main mood of your scene now you should start thinking about the gameplay and lighting for your critical path to review the critical path is kind of like the ideal things that your ideal player would kind of do in a certain order or whatever in your level and at this stage you should probably focus on navigation and wayfinding does the player know various interesting entrances and exits and would know where they are David talked about this a lot in his talk about how they care a lot about wayfinding lighting is another tool for you to do that and here I'm using it in

like a really painfully obvious way where I'm using like bright orange lights on bright red doors feel free to be more subtle than that in your own work but for example for the purposes of this example it's like super obvious and when you're doing that I also urge you to think about kind of like the hierarchy of different things you're doing here here I would argue the left door is being lit to be more important than the door on the right the door on the left kind of has a wider spotlight and it's more intense and brighter and also kinda has its own room and shadows to the contrasts much stronger meanwhile that door on the right it's certainly an option and it certainly reads as like an entrance or exit to this room but it's also a bit more faint so now we're emphasizing this door on the left super-important this door on the right it's like okay you know it's an okay door but you you know that door know that yeah then once you're done doing

main player wayfinding and also you're like testing throughout all this right you should be thinking about the in other interactions in your game so if you're setting up any NPCs or set-pieces or encounters you should be trying to light those encounters so that the player will actually notice what's going on so here these are like critical gameplay objects that you might want to light like enemies coming into the room or maybe the enemies are like guarding an objective or something so on the Left they're guarding this orb the orb is very important in this game I assure you and I have I set up a blue blue green kind of turquoise flight and it's kind of coming at this perpendicular angle to that orange arrow which is what I imagine is the players critical path in this case and when you have that blue light coming like a grazing perpendicular angle kind of that helps set that up as a rim light to help emphasize the shapes going on there

instead of the surfaces kind of same thing going on in the example on the right you might see two small people two small silhouettes in the background and that's because I've kind of thrown a background light behind them so those silhouettes end up popping out and you notice them really easily so again if you're like lighting stuff where like soldiers are enemies like jump through windows or something you might want to have a light behind them to help frame them and help them pop out and when you're doing this you should be thinking about your texture pass texturing is pretty important I think that's why David talks about using color a lot you should be thinking about the basic values this is a page the I basically just took these from some unreal UDK documentation but here the albedo on the left is really dark and an albedo diffuse section on the right is much brighter and when that you have that

dark albedo the light doesn't bounce as much because most game engines use the albedo texture to calculate calculate reflectance for indirect light so you can see that scene ends up feeling really really dark in a weird way but if you use a brighter albedo in that bottom right example now the scene is kind of evenly illuminated and it feels much more like sunlight and one really easy way to check this is if you open up your albedo or diffuse texture in Photoshop open up the levels histogram look at that most of your values should me be more in the upper mid-range and then usually want to leave the left and right the extreme values empty so that lighting can do its work so don't try to do extreme black or extreme white and oh my god running out of time okay I'll try to go fast so this is also where gliding is really really important I think where some stuff might be too dark and some stuff might look great and I think that has a very strong political valence to it this is an example from an article called black

skin is still a radical concept in videogames and in this one the woman on the right from Skyrim I think I would argue is lit pretty well you can read all the different contours and surface plains of her face meanwhile the woman on the left is lit very poorly I think where I can't really read her face that well her chin and jaw are like totally lost and I'm not I'm not trying to like call out Skyrim or professed uh like III think I don't think there was like an evil racist at Bethesda going hahaha right I think this is just another an example of like institutional racism that happens in video games where maybe playtesters we're testing mostly with white characters so they never saw that black characters are really poorly in this game or need more specular contribution on their on the reflection or light probes or whatever is going on in Skyrim so it's important for us to take responsibility for art and in if in

doubt just ask a collaborator so that you can kind of avoid situations like these and then the last step is you should maybe iterate on your level keep trying different lighting schemes and this is an example of a lava like sci-fi scene that's lit four different ways so keep experimenting with your lighting but at the same time no one to stop and move on with your life this is a trap that a lot of level designers fall into they keep tweaking lights a little bit brighter a little bit darker as if that'll make a huge difference it will not I guarantee you just make the lights as good as you can and then move on may come back to it later if you have more time you won't have more time but you know go back to it later just say that to yourself and move on and make the rest of your game so to review real quick lighting sets moon and evokes culture there's four different light types common to a lot of 3d game engines and tool sets three-point lighting argues that you

should think about the task and function of each light and what it's doing for the image composition like globally do your big lights first and then do start doing spot checks for gameplay and critical paths and also no one to stop fiddling with your lights and move on and make your game and don't just keep fiddling with one light thanks for listening that was me apply [ __ ] [Applause]