Black CAT ADVENTURES - Importance of Light and Colour

Peter Tran and his trusty Black Cat give us an insight on what is required of a lighting artist, important skills to apply from photography and cinematography and some of the common mistakes he sees in environments.

Introduction

Hey there! I'm Peter and I am currently a lighting artist at Ubisoft Montréal. I was a self taught 2D artist since highschool and I did a little bit of fine art in college but I dropped out to go into a 3D animation and CGI major in an other college. I learned a ton from my fine art major but it wasn't for me. I was really into concept art back then and fine art was kind of helping me, but it also pushed me to the gaming industry at the same time. I wanted to paint epic concept arts for games and such, not traditional oil paintings and wood crafts.

Anyway, fast forward a year, I got really hooked into 3D environment art and I wanted to translate what I loved about concept art into 3D. I wanted to model the typical super epic landscapes with a stellar composition and all. However, I found out quickly what I was lacking in all of my assignments in school; my lighting in 3D environments were pretty much non-existent. The flat looking 3D scenes were not the epic concept arts I had in mind at all. I could do all the paintovers I wanted but it wouldn't be a 3D scene anymore. After a while, I found out that ''lighters'' were a real thing and I never looked back from it. It got me so interested in that role and what they do. Being responsible of the lighting and setting up the mood is such a rewarding and fulfilling job in my opinion. They really bring every art department together in the end.

Right after graduating college, I managed to get an internship and then full-time position as a lighting artist at Tuque Games. I worked on an official Dungeons & Dragons game with Wizard of the Coast! The game is currently under development with an extremely talented team. After a year there, I received an offer out of the blue from Ubisoft Montréal to work on an unannounced title. It was a real dilemma for me since I loved what we've been doing at Tuque but I felt that it was my calling to take that leap of faith. I've been working here at Ubisoft since then!

Lighting an Environment

I always try to find a good composition first for my cameras and then I start working from there. I usually avoid using local lights in the beginning, I always try to find a good sun angle first with the sky. Just by doing that, it might take a few days to maybe weeks of iterations. If I follow a concept art to work with, it'll take less time, if not then I'd spend a lot of time brainstorming for ideas and iterating. After figuring out a solid first lighting pass with the sun and sky, I try to go and enhance the lighting with local lights for extra highlights, specularity and colors. I'd also try to keep in mind that the post processing and fog will also affect my lighting.

My end goal process is really to have good ''paintings'' if I ever take a screenshots from the main perspective. If it looks like a good concept art as a thumbnail, it's a job well done in my book. In a video game context though, it's a bit different since there's a lot more performance and gameplay constraints.

Monochromatic Environments

The trick is having good values and a composition that works in a scene. As I said, I come from a concept art background (kinda) and painting only in values is a thing. A lot of concept artists have spent a ton of time training to paint with greyscale only to master their values. After you get proper values then you can tint it as much as you want and it's most likely going to work as long the values were solid in the first place. If you don't have proper values, no colors will save your scene.

Common Lighting Mistakes

I think lighting is often neglected in schools/beginners and some lighting mistakes are very common in every student portfolios. From what I've seen, when a lighting seems off, it's because there's too much of something. Too much lighting, too much shadow, too much colors or too much of nothing. When there's too much of something, it can easily flatten out the scene. Good lighting needs a good balance of everything as cliche as it may sounds. Not everything needs to be lit during day time, not everything needs to be dark even if it's at night and not everything needs to be covered in fog to be creepy.

Common sense would be to light the environment like real life, right? I mean, if you go outside and take a photo of an exterior building, it's most likely lit naturally either by the sun or a lamp. That's a very realistic approach but you'd be surprised by how lighting doesn't actually make sense at all in a cinematic lighting. I think to improve lighting, you need to take a cinematic approach while understanding the realistic way. A quick example of a cinematic approach, in movies, whenever you see a candle on a table with actors sat near it, chances are the actors aren’t being lit by the candle. There's for sure a soft light somewhere either under the table or somewhere very subtle.

Understand the rules before breaking them. Best way to understand it? Photography. How to break it? Cinematography.

Overcast lighting is very tricky. Poorly done overcast lighting can be seen as if the environment is simply unlit and missing something. On a cloudy day, you definitely feel that there's a very subtle shadow and you can kinda figure out the direction as well. To put it into an environment, it would be achievable, but it can be difficult to do with dynamic lighting since you really need soft shadows from the sun and the sky. It would be a bit more simple to get that kind of look with baked lighting.

Future Adventures of the Black Cat

I'm planning on going back to something that I've used to do which is more urban environments rather than natural and organic environments. That being said, I'd need to jump back on modeling and texturing a little bit to achieve that! For the past few years, I haven't really focused on asset production at all since my main area of expertise is lighting, however since I have a little bit more time lately, I'd try to go back having fun with all the asset production. My goal would be to redo my Memory Lane project and get a good epic comparison from 2018 to now with the same layout. I think it'll show how much I've improved since I graduated!

On a side note for future personal projects, I'd be interested in doing collabs with other environment artists! If I ever re-start modeling, it would really be a long term, learning study on my own. In more short terms, I'd rather team up with other killer environment artists to do lighting for personal projects! I've been mostly buying projects on the unreal marketplace but if I ever get the chance to do the original lighting, I'd be happy to. Hit me up if you're interested!