LIGHTING

Thick As Thieves

Light and Shadow Gameplay

Thick As Thieves is a stealth game which uses light and shadow to determine if you are visible to a guard's watchful eyes. The goal for lighting each space was to direct and inform the player which areas were lit or safe to hide in the shadows.

Below are some examples of lighting work I contributed to. I was responsible for the light fixtures, both in their function and lighting properties. I also helped balance exposure settings and how rooms appeared when lights were off.

Marketing Screenshots

I helped composed and light these early screenshots for the announcement of Thick As Thieves.

Environment and Weather

Thick As Thieves supported different weather environments such as Rain and Fog. Exposure values we kept in a similar range to ensure lights would not appear too bright or dark in different weather.

Dynamic Lighting

We also supported dynamic lighting, so we needed to light for both fully illuminated spaces and also the absent of light. Time of day was at night, so we could not rely on a global illumination from the sun or moon lighting.

This is a video showing some rooms with both lights on and off, and without the use of 'Emissive Shapes'.

Emissive Shapes

Our solution was to use emissive materials to help fill in for the lack of lighting. We first tried shaping them to match the bulb, however this required a high intensity value that introduced a lot of noise in the environment.

This is an example of all the element combined: Lights On/Off, Emissive Shapes On/Off, No Emissive Shapes, and lighting for shadow gameplay.

Seeing in the Dark

We treated the Emissive Shapes similar to light probes, using them all over to fill in the dark corners of the map. This also proved to be a huge win for performance settings where global illumination is not available.

Reflections were an issue, however, which required an engine mod to set their emissive materials to black for software ray traced reflections (not pictured).

Lighting Test Scene

The following video shows the methods and optimizations we used for lighting in Thick As Thieves.

Mission Lobby Background

This next shot combines all of the art team's contributions. I personally love working on menu background shots because you get to work with so many elements in game development.

Additional Credits