First pass of lighting

Right now we are working on first passes of lighting tests, exploring different lighting possibilities and how to make everything look as aesthetically pleasing as possible. We're mapping out what we want by painting over environment concept art first, then we'll work inside of Maya to light our actual scenes for our rendered background images. The characters will have much of their lighting hand-painted into their colors, and then they'll be individually lit inside the game engine to create any character shadows we need.

For the office, we want emphasis on the interviewed character, but we also want the background to have lighting possibilities that can act light the lights of a theatre stage. As distractions or other mechanics occur in the background, different lights will be able to subtly turn up and light the area. Otherwise those areas will be slightly dimmed, giving our interview area and the desk the greatest amount of light, and the faint glow of the skyline through the windows.

Katie Freeman made edits on her office environment concept art to get an idea of what we will want to do in Maya for lighting.

For the debriefing room we plan to have it brightly lit like a classroom. 

Jose Morales did a quick layout using the props he has modeled so far, added area, directional, and point lights in Maya, then did a paintover in Photoshop to get a feel for the type of lighting we want to aim for. Take a look!

For the lineup phase, we met the challenge of wanting dramatic shadows on the back walls but not wanting dramatic shadows pulling down at the faces of our characters. To avoid this and get the look we want, the back wall will be lit in the game engine, then the 2D character cards will sit in front of it with enough distance that they aren't hit by the lights for the background (the lights will sit right up against the background card). Then they'll have their own light on their faces, simultaenously lighting them and creating the dramatic character shadows on the back wall.

Here's a screenshot from our original prototype showing the type of lighting we plan to accomplish: