The project that I created was intended
as a demonstration of how light and colour can be used in
environments to help evoke emotions (most obvious ends of the
spectrum being happiness and depression), and also be used as a
guiding tool for the player. A single large environment was created for this purpose, as we wanted a very polished final piece, rather than a collection of smaller, less polished scenes. This had a major downside in that the project could only explore a limited number of colour selections, lighting techniques and styles. I feel that had we perhaps gotten our idea sorted at an earlier date, we could have perhaps explored these to a certain extent, before deciding to bring one further to a highly polished stage.
In terms of the aim of the lighting in the scene, I
feel a good attempt at the was made, however due to technical difficulties with lighting in UDK certain aspects of the project were unable to be fully realised in the given time frame. For instance, due to problems with having static and dynamic shadows at the same time causing major performance issues, only one type of shadow was able to be used. This meant we chose dynamic shadows over the static shadows, as it was felt the day/night cycle was more crucial to the scene and allowed for more experimentation with lighting through motion. This did however mean all the static lighting in the rooms of the house no longer cast shadows, which definitely reduced their quality in my opinion.
A dynamic dominant
directional light was used in conjunction with sky textures to mimic a moving sun, which acts as the main light in the scene, for other
lights to be placed on top. Each light in the scene was positioned to
lead the eye of the player in the direction of the next important
point along a path, with light being left absent in offshoot areas
that had very little path before ending. One of the best examples of
this within the project is in the main entrance area as the player
goes up the stairs from the lounge.
They are given 2 options –
a left or a right staircase. The stair on the right is barely lit,
only with what little light comes through the shuttered windows,
while the stair on the left is light from below and above. While time
ran out to conduct user testing, it is hoped that this use of
lighting will make the player choose the left path, as they would
feel it is the more inviting of the two.
One of my light design ideas I unfortunately ran out of time to add into the level was the fade to
white when the player jumps off the church tower. Currently the player simply reaches the hole in the wall at the top of the tower, and jump down into the garden, where they can choose to explore further, but i feel the fade to white would have added a nice lighting element to the project, and a discernible end point
As for the use of colour, a lot more
time ended up being spent on fine tuning the colour of the light
rather than the colours in the scene itself, which is something I
would have liked to have developed further, and feel would have
greatly improved the project. This is not to say it was not something
that did not have heavy consideration behind – The use of a Mediterranean style house was intentional as they are often coloured
with yellow hues, which help provide a sense of warmth, especially
when a strong light is applied on top. This sense of warmth and comfort was continued throughout the textures of the first half of the level, which should take place in the section between the morning and evening lighting
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| Garden Texture - Mainly warm oranges and reds, to reflect the sense of warmth |
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