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Lighting design for cinematic realism

Tutorial
Intermediate
20 Mins
Overview
Details
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Your progress
Where am I?
1.
Overview
2.
High fidelity cinematic realism
3.
Service Room: Creating the reflective pools
4.
Service Room: Adding other lighting sources
5.
Exolab: Highlighting the key elements
6.
Exolab: Lighting the platform
7.
Review without post-processing effects
8.
Summary
Also included in
Project
High Fidelity Game Visuals: Lighting Artist
Summary
In this tutorial, you will explore the Lighting Artist’s approach to delivering cinematic realism for
the Buried Memories: Serekh demo.
This tutorial is part of Buried Memories: High Fidelity Game Visuals.
Recommended Unity versions
2018.3
Topics we'll cover
Lighting & Visual Fidelity
Industry
Games
Language
English

Tutorial
Lighting design for cinematic realism
0

1.Overview
In this tutorial, you’ll explore the Lighting Artist’s approach to implementing lights to create
cinematic realism in more depth.

2.High fidelity cinematic realism

Lighting is a key factor that contributes to game visuals being considered high fidelity. Whether the
setting is a realistic rural landscape or a gritty cyberpunk city, lighting design contributes towards
the overall worldbuilding of the game and has a significant impact on the player’s experience as
they explore the environment.
For Buried Memories: Serekh, the team placed the fantastical element of their project, the Kirin,
within a hard industrial environment. The lighting design needed to highlight the realism of the
environment whilst contributing to the mysterious atmosphere in a cinematic style.

3.Service Room: Creating the reflective pools

The Lighting Artist selected the four pools of water as the primary lighting source in the room. This
helps emphasize the green color palette and creates a softer, more ambient lighting than other
setting-appropriate alternatives (such as striplights) might have provided. Their use of additional
lighting details complements rather than detracts from the mystery created by the pools.

The pool light process

To create these pools, the Lighting Artist used the following process:
First, they created a spotlight and position it to light the bottom of one of the four pools. The bottom
of the pool acts as a reflector, and reflects light back into the room.
Spotlight placed over a reflective pool

Next, they made a Prefab of the spotlight, and created an instance for each of the pools within the
room.

Spotlight Prefab in the Project window of Unity Editor

Then the Lighting Artist adjusted the Prefab until they achieved ambient lighting with soft
gradients, but retaining a sense of directionality. Adjustments to a Prefab are automatically
propagated across the other instances of the Prefab in the Scene.
Calibrated spotlight in the Inspector

Finally, the Lighting Artist baked the indirect lighting and adjust intensity and color in the room
until it matched the design established in the concept art.
4.Service Room: Adding other lighting sources
Additional lights contributed to the overall lighting of the Scene, and added atmosphere and
ambience. When adding additional light sources, the Lighting Artist identified optimal locations
where they could add lights that would:
• Align with the Concept Artist’s design
• Be restrained enough not to overwhelm the primary lights
It is often better to be restrained when adding lighting and visual effects, to produce a more natural
and unified visual style.

The lit Service Room in Buried Memories: Serekh

In the Service Room, the Lighting Artist added small repeated light sources throughout the room.
These enabled the design to closely follow the concept art and added additional detail. They were
also simple to iterate and adjust, using the Prefab workflow in Unity.

5.Exolab: Highlighting the key elements

In line with the concept art, the Environment Artist added some Area Lights in the walls of the
Exolab room before it reached the Lighting Artist:
Area Light in the Exolab room
The Lighting Artist chose to use the Area Lights, as their effect matched the concept art intention.
However, this placed little lighting emphasis on the pod, or differentiation between it and the rest of
the Scene.

Realtime lights
To place clearer emphasis on the pod, the Lighting Artist added:
• A strong light in the center of the Exolab room
• A volumetric spotlight positioned for light to emit upwards from the grid
The addition of these lights significantly increases the intensity of lighting around the pod, and
creates contrast with the surrounding areas of the room.

Baked lights
The Lighting Artist also softened the shadows and provided additional diffused lighting by adding:
• Softer baked Area Lights to the edges of the room, to increase the orange shade of the
ambient lighting at the bottom of the room
• A 2-meter baked background light, to add cooler color contrast to the lights at the top of the
room
6.Exolab: Lighting the platform
To give the platform in the Exolab more definition, the Lighting Artist added an orange volumetric
light to the platform light. Players can see the halo of light even if they cannot see the platform
itself:

Exolab balcony with orange volumetric light

This light also enables players to read the depth of the room more accurately.

7.Review without post-processing effects

Now that you’ve explored the Lighting Artist’s approach in more depth, explore their foundational
lighting implementation in the demo rooms without the post-processing effects:
1. In Unity Editor, open the Buried Memories: Serekh Asset Pack Project. This will take some time
to load.
2. Open the PlayableDemo Scene.
3. If you have not explored the demo in a previous tutorial, enter Play Mode and look through both
rooms. Consider how the different elements of visual design create atmosphere, and the impact that
this has on you as a player. Remember to exit Play Mode when you have finished.
4. In the Hierarchy, select the Post-process Volume GameObject.
5. In the Inspector, disable the Post Process Volume component checkbox
6. Enter Play Mode, and explore the two rooms created for the demo. As you explore consider:
• The difference in atmosphere without post-processing effects
• How effectively the most important elements of the rooms catch your attention with just the
basic lighting in place

Although post-processing effects are a vital element to polish high fidelity visuals, they require a
strong foundation of effective basic lighting.

8.Summary
In this tutorial, you have:
• Explored how the Lighting Artist approached lighting with cinematic realism
• Reviewed the lighting in the room without post-processing effects
Next, you’ll have the opportunity to create an illuminated object, like those which add realistic
detail to the demo Scene.
Lighting design for cinematic realism
General Tutorial Discussion
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1. Overview
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2. High fidelity cinematic realism
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3. Service Room: Creating the reflective pools
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4. Service Room: Adding other lighting sources
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5. Exolab: Highlighting the key elements
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6. Exolab: Lighting the platform
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7. Review without post-processing effects
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8. Summary
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