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Senior lighting artist and mentor.

Seeing Without Revealing. How to make everything visible but also invisible? Visual Horror and Lighting (Part 3.1) The Challenges of Low Key Images. The gameplay problem. In many games, a key task for Lighting Artists is to create a comfortable visual experience for players. However, in horror genres, the objective shifts to deliberately creating uncomfortable conditions, presenting almost opposite challenges. Practically, to achieve a successful visual horror effect, it’s essential to balance between comfort and discomfort for the player, making the environment visible enough to navigate while maintaining an ominous atmosphere conducive to suspense and fear. It's essential for the game environment to be navigable and recognizable, yet not fully disclosed, leaving room for hidden threats. Complete darkness in the game, a black screen, disconnects players from the gameplay (if it is not an experimental project with sound-based gameplay), as they cannot see where to go or interact with objects. While briefly used, this can trigger panic; darkness extended for too long may lead players to adjust their screen settings or even stop playing. This balance between visibility and concealment crafts a tension essential for the horror gaming experience, emphasizing the critical role of lighting in player engagement. The technical problem. Also there is a problem with the black levels. Players will be using different devices: like monitors, projectors or TVs. They all have different contrast and the level of black. For example: OLED monitors/TVs will likely see 0 value displayed as true black, because OLEDs technologically do not have backlight. It could cause some artifact or visual inconsistency. Can be fixed easily by adjusting the gamma. For the majority of home projectors, black level will be the brightness of the surface we are projecting on + a bit of ambient fill from the projector. In this situation, black colour that we see is purely achieved by the dynamic range(contrast) of the projector (difference between the darkest and brightest parts of an image). In other words, the brighter projector is - the deeper blacks are. If the image is dark and low contrasty - we will have flat, barely readable picture and it doesn't matter how brighter we adjust the projector - it will be lifting our shadows with an ambient fill as well. #horror #videogames #horrorgame #horrorart #gameart #lighting #gamedev #lightingdesign

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Thanks for sharing! Very interesting!

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