Light Prop
Longshoreman
Forward
Before diving into the light fixtures, I want to share the story behind this game’s render stack. The project went through a number of changes over time. We began with deferred rendering and later experimented with mega lights when they were introduced, curious to see what benefits they could bring. The results were awesome visually. The combination of baked lighting in a deferred pipeline with mega lights created visuals that were both crispy and dynamic. Shadows on dynamic lights felt almost limitless, with minimal artifacts, and it was exciting to push those boundaries.
Ultimately, however, we shifted to forward rendering and stepped away from mega lights. While this decision meant sacrificing a bit of visual fidelity, it nearly tripled our framerate. In the end, performance was the priority because for a competitive game, framerate is king.
Master Light Prop Blueprint
Creating a master light prop Blueprint kept lighting flexible throughout development. Balancing environment work and lighting meant I needed a system that saved time and adapted to change. At first, I built individual Blueprints per asset, but this quickly proved unscalable. Every new feature had to be added manually to each asset, and work was constantly being repeated.
To solve this, I built a single master Blueprint that all light props inherited from. This approach made it possible to add features once and have them propagate across all children, especially useful when we switched render stacks. It also streamlined iteration. Since all light props shared the same settings, I could select multiple at once and adjust their values directly in the Details panel.
Light and Emissive Material
The Blueprint also included editable variables that controlled both the emissive material and the light source. This meant values like color only needed to be set once instead of twice. The same applied to light intensity and effects such as flicker. Streamlining adjustments and keeping everything consistent across props.
That’s it for now. Checkout his resume and send him a email.