Lighting Artist Portfolio - Minecraft: Story Mode (Season Two)

Minecraft: Story Mode - Season Two was my second lighting assignment at Telltale Games after the completion of The Walking Dead: A New Frontier. I needed a break from the apocalyptic world of The Walking Dead and Minecraft presented a colorful and bright new (cubical) opportunity

This was my first project as the one and only lighting artist - which would be a trend for the rest of my projects here on out. At first, the producer who was overseeing the season was a little skeptical that a newbie like me (fresh off of only game prior) could handle the workload of an entire season. Those fears were laid to rest within the production of the first episode, fortunately, and Minecraft: Story Mode - Season 2 established myself as a lighting artist project lead.

There were two big challenges with lighting for Minecraft.

The biggest challenge is the fact that everything is made of cubes. There are no curved surfaces for lighting to wrap around and eventually fall off. Each face of the cube is going to have one quality of light in relation to the other face(s). Furthermore, there is no additional features to add shadow detail such as seen with normal maps. Lighting became a balance of always making sure there was contrast and directionality in a shot - otherwise everything looked very flat. Vanilla Minecraft is not very visually dynamic (without adding modifications or fancy shaders). We were told by Mojang to adhere to the look and feel of Minecraft as much as possible (and we definitely pushed the visuals when we could get away with it).

The other challenge was lighting a game that was being published on high end computers and current gen platforms (at the time, this was PS4 and XboxOne), as well as, mobile phones, and the Xbox 360. For resource management, I was basically overseeing three versions of the game. A high quality version, a medium quality version, and a low quality version (for Xbox 360 and most mobile devices). So there was a lot of micromanaging of individual lights - flagging them as dynamic, or shadow casting, or baked depending on the various quality levels. It was a headache and introduced many platform specific bugs. To combat this, the art director (Mark Hamer) and I would constantly do play throughs on the various platforms to assess and fix issues before they were caught by the overworked Q&A team, ss well as, just trying to troubleshoot how we can bring the visual quality up regardless of platform.