These video series turned out to be a bit longer than I initially intended, but it does cover a lot of ground on my lighting process. It's a 4 part (3.5 hours total) series on lighting a night time scene in Valve's proprietary Source 2 engine, from scratch.
Lighting is one of the most important aspects of game art, it makes or breaks the presentation of a level, it has an impact on performance and gameplay, since a good lighting pass may be used to enhance player navigation among other important things like telling a narrative through art.
Starting with a pre made scene as a daytime lit environment set in the city of Porto, we'll be covering different kinds of light setups, different kinds of lights and fog settings, materials, effects, prefabs, 3D Skybox, HDR Skybox texture and material, bakes, post processing and the philosophy behind lighting game environments.
If you want to experiment with Source 2 engine, you'll need to grab yourself a copy of Half Life Alyx, and download the workshop tools, that said however, I don't necessarily believe the techniques shown here are unique to this engine, quite the contrary they are interchangeable with any other engine you might work with, be it a inhouse or Unreal Engine as many tools tend to be very similar, I touch on a lot of "philosophy" behind lighting in game levels as I work on it, so come on and follow along... :)
Enjoy, and thank you for watching.