Creating the Lighting for Resistance: Fall of Man

Page 4

 

Lightmaps:

Most of what you're seeing in these images is the result of light mapping. Light mapping is "baking" the lighting into the environment. That means that a lightmap is generated for every object in the level. A lightmap is a type of texture that contains only lighting information...so every object that's light mapped has both a shader assigned to it (with color, spec, normal, bump etc.) and a lightmap.

 

Lightmaps don't look very exciting. Here's one that was used for the area in the next shot:

The yellowish/green areas represent black or dark spots, and the bluish/reddish areas represent where there's lighting. Since a lightmap is an actual image file, it has the same issues that other texture files do…namely, the higher the resolution, the larger the texture, and the more space it will take up on the disc, and the more RAM it will eat. I would love to be able to give every object in the game a 1024 x 1024 lightmap, but each texture at that size takes up ~3 megs. Now multiply 3 megs by the (literally) thousands of objects in a level, and try to imagine how many heavy objects the programmers would be hurling at me.

Compression helps quite a bit of course (a shout-out is due here to Peter Chan, who along with his other many duties goes through the levels after they're lit and compresses all the lightmaps that need it) but even with compression, a decision has to be made for every single object in the game as to what size lightmap it will get. Tiny objects that will never be close to the player's view get really small lightmaps, while the largest of the lightmaps are usually used on the large chunks of landscape. Also, objects that have a lot of vertices close together can be vertex lit, avoiding the need for a lightmap.

 

Northern Command. These tunnels were fun to light. The idea here was that the main power was out, so everything was lit by emergency lighting.

Designer: Colin Munson

Environment Artists: Craig Goodman, Yancy Young, Tiffany Vongerichten.

 

Here's the result of the lightmaps only, without textures.

 

Cool doorway.

 

One of the lighting goals in a game like Resistance is to create areas that will give the player a feeling that something around the next corner is going to try to bite their face off. The above shot is a good example of what a difference lighting can make for the creepiness factor. Imagine playing the game in the non-lit version, and how very not-scary that would be.

 

Another place you wouldn't want to hang around very long.

 

Pipes and grates. ..fun stuff.

 

A scene from this area ingame.

 

Chamber in train station.

 

The lighting without textures, and the model wireframes.