Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Asset Creation: Advanced
Shading, Lighting, and Baking
You're a baker baking a cake. You fly to South America to personally select
the very best chocolate, travel to Wisconsin to personally massage the cows
so they produce the very best milk, assemble pure wheat from Nebraska
after ensuring that every stalk is untouched by anything that would mar
the precious kernels it held, sing to the chickens every night in the barn to
make sure they lay the most perfect eggs, and then after putting all these
ingredients in a bowl, you go out and grab the water needed from the
gutter outside. This is how beginning game artists far too often go about
approaching their shading/lighting/baking design in their levels.
Much, much too often students spend huge amounts of time planning, modeling,
and texturing a level or set design. They spend many sleepless nights refining a
normal map to get the bump just right on a character's costume. They go without
food and drink to get the form just right on a piece of architectural detail. Then,
when all the models and textures are complete—often after weeks or even
months of effort—they try and slap together a lighting scheme in 15 minutes.
Models and textures are only as good as the lights that illuminate them.
Many a beautiful asset has been completely muddied and ruined by poor
