Creating the Lighting for Resistance: Fall of Man
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The Tools: It would be lame of me to talk about the lighting processes without mentioning our awesome programmers. Bear in mind that we did not lease an existing game engine for R:FoM, this engine was written by our own programmers. The core engine itself, the physics, the effects engine, the audio core, the interface, the tools and the lighting were written by our own guys and gals. Add to that the daunting task of the first game in a new series with major engine changes from previous games, then add to that the fact that it was to be a launch title for a new system (the Playstation 3) and I think you'll agree that they pretty much kicked ass.
The department I work with the most often is the Tools department, who as the name suggests, create the tools we use to make said games. Having an excellent tools department is a wonderful thing, because you can make a request for something to work a certain way, and somebody will actually make it happen. The importance of this cannot be stressed enough.
We use Maya as our 3D program, so the 3D assets are created there, but we also use a number of programs that were written in-house that interact with Maya. In R:FoM, lights were created and placed in Maya, but that's changed already, and in Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, lights are created and placed in an in-house program for better interaction with the levels during creation. The tools are constantly evolving.
Control room on the aircraft carrier.
Control room concept by Rolf Mohr.
Lower deck of aircraft carrier, U.S.S. Lexington. Designers: Colin Munson, James Messina.
Environment Artists: Marcus Lull, Chris Capili.
Here's a shot showing all of the objects hidden except for the floor and walls. You can see how the shadows are baked into the surfaces.
Another view of the lower deck.
Lower deck sketch by Rolf Mohr.
Main deck of aircraft carrier.
Early concept art for aircraft carrier by Rolf Mohr.
Forward section of flight deck. Nice long shadows here.
Q.A. Unleashed: As a project reaches the end of it's production cycle, the level lighting is just about complete, and it's time for Q.A. to start reporting bugs with the lighting. Up until now, they've been playing through the game endlessly, looking for bugs with gameplay, collision, texture problems, broken animations, level load failures, improper enemy behavior, you name it. Now they're asked to go ahead and log bugs for lighting issues as well...it helps to have as many eyes as possible looking for problems. At that point, our job is to keep up with the daily bug list, and work our way down to no bugs with the lighting by the final date for the gold disc candidate.
And then it's off to the manufacturers. If you've worked on games or any other creative endeavor for that matter, you probably know the feeling of wishing you could have done just a little bit more. I'm happy with the games I've worked on, but also find myself seeing the mistakes I've made and wishing I could go back and fix them. That's a normal part of the process, and gives us an opportunity to learn from our mistakes and apply that knowledge to the next game.
The Future: Well, that about wraps it up. I hope this was of some interest to those of you that may be considering lighting or game art in general, and if nothing else provided a small glimpse of "behind-the-scenes". I'd like to thank Insomniac Games for letting me use these before and after images.
If you'd like to read more about different aspects of game development at Insomniac, be sure to check out the Insomniac Games R&D section. This will be updated with new articles, and it's already got a lot of cool programming info.
UPDATE: Since the time I wrote this article, I've gone from Insomniac to Psyonix, to Crytek, to 343 Industries. I'm now freelancing and working from home. If there's anything else you're curious about related to lighting, drop me a line.
-Eric Gooch
