Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
8
Lighting in Virtual Environments
Second Life and OpenSim
It is still color, it is not yet light.
—Pierre Bonnard
8.1 LIGHTING IS CRUCIAL
Light is the great transmitter that slips through the tiniest aperture, carrying crucial information about form,
texture, and color to our brains. Light is also a transcendent medium of emotional cognition, providing us
with a daily spectrum of visual moods and meanings. For these reasons and some more you are about to
discover, lighting is a crucial element of great design.
8.2 THREE MAIN JOBS THAT LIGHTING HAS TO DO
In a nutshell, there are three basic things that lighting should do within a virtual environment. However you
structure the arrangement of these lights or change the materials on your forms and no matter how complex the
environmental structures or characters, your lighting must (1) illuminate the meaning (or purpose) of this environ-
ment, (2) support the mood(s), and (3) augment the visual style. Let's go into the details of how lighting does that.
8.2.1 i
lluminaTing
The
m
eaning
(
or
p
urpose
)
of
y
our
V
irTual
e
nVironmenT
One of the most interesting things to do is to design lighting that illuminates the meaning or purpose of your
virtual environment. To do this, you will need to ind the key concept. In fact, that concept may be a “moving
target” in the early developmental stages of your project. What you are looking for is one or two key words
that will anchor your lighting design to a solid conceptual foundation from which you can create a dynamic
lighting structure throughout the environment.
Let's look at three very different environments: your high school cafeteria, the center ring of a circus,
and the interior settings of a ilm by Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) called
Barry Lyndon
(1975, produced by
Warner Brothers). Just now, these examples probably created three wildly different images in your imagi-
nation. Let's break them down into descriptive components, emotive aspects, and key concepts so we can
understand what lighting might contribute to the environment.
Use your visuospatial sketchpad to call up memories and think about describing your high school cafeteria.
Quite possibly, it was a large, open space organized by the various levels of social status within the school.
In many ways, it was like the throne room of a castle, full of courtiers and court members surrounding
the royalty. The nerds and geeks (courtiers/advisors to the royalty) sat with each other, the cheerleaders
and athletes (royalty) sat together, and the unpopular and unattached (court members) mingled randomly.
You might choose
hierarchy
as your key word in the concept for this scenario.
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