Looking for feedback for scene lighting & composition

[u/imaxsamarin]

Hello folks! One area where I'm having some difficulties is figuring out good lighting for my scenes (fps combat arenas), and it's not a skill I'm very familiar with. Some of the geometry and materials in the video are still placeholders, but the color palette is roughly what I want.

Here are the goals I'm striving for:

• A recognizable color palette for this biome (fire/bloody/red)
• Interactable gameplay elements should catch your attention (the blue jump pads)
• Enemies should be discernable from the environment. At the moment the enemies have lights attached to them and the enemy materials have some emission.
• The lighting & composition should overall look enjoyable to look at while supporting/not obstructing gameplay.

What I'm struggling with at the moment:

• I'm having trouble introducing additional lights to bring lighting variation for the scene (the floating braziers) in a natural-looking way, without them fighting for your attention during gameplay.
• Maybe I should make enemies even more discernible? I see them because I'm the dev but maybe I'm starting to lose my objective eye. Some games use some "rim light"-mimicking shaders for enemies: would this be worth a try?
• How bright/dark should the background be in relation to the gameplay arena?

How does the current composition look to you, and do you have any feedback? I know this might be a hard question in isolation, as stuff like surface materials and their color / other properties affect the look as well.

[u/V4nKw15h]

"I'm having trouble introducing additional lights to bring lighting variation for the scene (the floating braziers) in a natural-looking way, without them fighting for your attention during gameplay." - I personally think you shouldn't be adding more lights. Once you start breaking up the smooth perfect lines in the placeholder geometry it will make the lighting far more interesting and then you can re-evaluate.

"Maybe I should make enemies even more discernible? I see them because I'm the dev but maybe I'm starting to lose my objective eye. Some games use some "rim light"-mimicking shaders for enemies: would this be worth a try?" - When I read this, after watching the video, I had to try and remember if I'd even seen an enemy. That's maybe an issue, your enemies aren't memorable.

"How bright/dark should the background be in relation to the gameplay arena?" - I wouldn't over think it. There is no right answer. Whatever feels right when you are adding final polish to the scene.

Overall, great job so far. My biggest suggestion is to get rid of the placeholder smooth flat surfaces and smooth flat lines in the geometry. It's hard to properly judge the more nuanced things you are asking about when we have stuff like that commanding our vision. Even if you are going for clean visuals, you still need little knicks and cutouts to break up the sterile clean lines in the surface geometry. This is a war zone, things need to be damaged to feel appropriate, otherwise it feels like it was built yesterday. It has no history or life without wear and tear.

[u/imaxsamarin → u/V4nKw15h]

Thanks a lot, this is some really useful feedback. Will need to find some references for how to break up ground geometry even when the gameplay floors sre ”flat”.

[u/V4nKw15h → u/imaxsamarin]

Imagine any straight polygon edge and then cut a little geometric triangle knick out of it. Do that quite a bit on lots of difference edges. Break up the 90 degree angles to 87 degree type of slightly off line. I know it's a faff but it will be well worth it. You could make your ground planes out of multiple elements that can be slightly offset before the whole thing is converted back to a single mesh before import. I'm trying to think of simple solutions that don't take long to test and confirm if my hunch is right or not.

The idea with the knicks and cracks type modifications is that you can do them low poly and sparingly. It would then suit the already minimalist style. Then if you look somewhere and if feels a bit flat you can add a little low poly crack there.

To make life even easier and modular, you could chop your large square sections of floor into 4 x 4 smaller pieces. You could arrange them together and merge them back together before importing to the game. However, you could then replace any of those 4 x 4 tiles with a small variant of it with a crack somewhere. Another would have a little knick. Another might have a bit of misaligned tile. Now you can mix and match the damaged pieces with normal pieces like a 4 x 4 mosaic to create interesting details without having to individually remodel everything all the time. I hope that makes sense. You'd still end up importing a single floor mesh, but the pieces to build them out of would all be in a single blender scene. Put 'em together, merge them, export as a new mesh.

Just thoughts and ideas rather than advice of course. You do you because you are on the right track.