With our recent launch of SunBurn Framework complete I had some time to do what I enjoy most (mess around with SunBurn!)

I like to do quick scene "sketches" to determine how a certain art style and focus will come across in engine. Here's a glimpse into my thought process regarding how I came up with the lighting and materials of the scene.

First, we'll look at the scene without any textures on it. I use this method to get a rough lighting setup. This also demonstrates how little geometry definition you need to create a great looking scene with the tools SunBurn provides.

Applying materials (diffuse and normal with specular) really brings out the barrels. Giving the metal a much brighter specular emphasis really drives home the material definition.

For the floor texture, I went with a more "industrial" feel with metal grating. Why? Because it's awesome!

Let's do something with that wall.

Hmm, looks pretty bland. This is due to the lack of color variation in the lighting. Take a look at a few lights in your house or apartment, each one will likely give off a different tint due to the type of bulbs, shades or colors around it. This is what gives a scene depth.

Let's add a orange glowing light above the top barrel to mimic a glowing lantern (though I didn't get around to modeling it yet). Making it a shadow caster will add a lot to the scene.

Looks good, but the main directional light is killing it's effectiveness a bit. So let's disable that.

Much more atmospheric, but much too dark. It also has the same problem as before with having too little color variation. Two accent lights will help liven the room, but let's have two lights of opposing tints to help really bring something to the scene. I've added light orange and light blue point lights to opposite corners of the room. giving a very nice feel to the scene.

The lighting hues look fantastic, but the overall lighting effect looks flat due to the lack of shadows. John will hate when I do this, but let's add some shadow casters.

Here I've added two shadow casters in close proximity to the accent lights. Due to the simplicity of the scene, this hasn't really caused any performance concerns (still over 60 FPS on a 8800GT with heavy AA enabled).

I call this one finished for now.

Thanks for reading!

Alex

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Posted 12-19-2009 2:55 AM by Alex "Turbosmooth Operator"