The Gnomon School hosts great talks on the making of games and movies. I’ve attended a couple of these talks before and they were always more impressive than I imagined them to be. The last one I went to was one by Naughty Dog, on the subject of the making of Uncharted, and I had attened a Wall-E session before that. It was a great talk that not only covered the visual side of development, but how the game design meshed together with it.

The latest talk was covering the visual effects of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. The game was developed as a joint effort between two game development studios, Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games.

Lighting

The first segment discussed lighting, the talk was given by Dave Blizard of Sledgehammer Games. He began his talk going over the history and significance of light.

  • Light is made up of a combination of colors.
  • Science & Religion has long given significance to light.
  • Mayan’s Yucatan Temple of Kukulkan was designed with light in mind. 2 times a year, a shadow is cast on it to bring a serpent to life along the outer walls of the temple.

He showed a slide of how a sun overhead can be a religious symbol and fascinates people because it is so unusual — showing pictures of tourists capturing the moments when the shadow is directly overhead.

He then uses this point to show how a directly overhead shadow in a game looks pretty terrible and bland.

For inspiration in lighting scenes, he would look to chiaroscuro in old paintings.

Continue Reading…