Brutal Legend Cutscene Lighting

I did a lot of the cutscene lighting in Brutal Legend.

While the game world featured dynamic time of day lighting, we manually added point lights for character lighting in our cutscenes.  A couple of tricky things: 1) The point lights were stationary and were placed in the environment, but the characters move around a lot.  Since the cutscenes could play during any Time of Day, we sometimes forced the sun direction in cutscenes to avoid the character being entirely in shadow. It wasn’t the best solution but some manual lighting love did add a lot of visual quality and drama style in our closeup character cutscenes by adding custom fill lights etc.

2) the same cutscene lighting rig had to operate well in all weather/TimeOfDay conditions, sometimes we would have multiple cutscene lighting rigs per TOD.

For an awesome showcase of Brutal Legend’s dynamic climate/lighting system, see this video set up by our Lead Technical Artist Drew Skillman.
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