TolerLive | Tyler Klimek

I’m happy to share that next week I’m starting a new position as Senior Lighting Artist @turtlerockstudios.bsky.social ! I'm stoked to be joining such an immensely talented team and look forward to building something amazing together!

Yeah the game is really enjoyable and a type of gameplay experience I feel like we havent had in quite a while. Reeks of charisma and charm and fits in perfectly with the films it is adapting.

Indiana Jones and The Great Circle is my GOTY and very very likely in my top 10 games of all time. I'm not finished quite yet but wow. What a pleasant surprise!

Right! This was one of the first occasions with post-launch MP content where the environment team dug into the existing campaign assets which really helped speed up the early arting stages as well.

On this particular map, the design, environment art, and lighting were all done in a single month. It was an incredibly fast turn around

Typically a V1 pass would be done in a single sprint. Then V2 would have multiple passes done across a few sprints with a lot of changes implemented as design and environment implemented new ideas, likewise with V3.

And map size dictates different work flows. For instance a large-scale Big Team Battle map (where i did the majority of my MP work) takes significantly longer than a smaller arena map. And when the map has designers/artists across multiple support studios assisting there can be a lot of push/pull

Typically my sprints consisted of working on multiple maps and projects simultaneously so in terms of time it takes longer to finish a single map. So not necessarily 6 months of actual time dedicated to that one map, but 6 months of work-time.

Sure thing! Typically our lighting is done in stages and split i to a V1, V2, and V3 pass. While we may do a V1 pass in a week, it may be a month or more before we really dive into V2 as we wait for design and environments to art the map up. (Part 1. Dang word limits)

Exactly! V1 is the quickest pass. Mostly existing as a means to provide visibility to the map for the designers and environment artists to work. V2 is where the colors, tone, shadows, player guidance really starts to form and the art direction/concept art begins to become a reality.

Multiple maps/projects each week*. No edit feature on here!

So basically it's not 6 months of directly doing that map every day. There's a lot of push and pull while waiting on other teams as you can't finish lighting without everything else being finished. Which also means I'm working on multiplayer maps/projects each week and not solely working on just one

Typically during my time on Infinite lighting was done in 3 "passes". V1, V2, and V3. in the beginning I'll do a V1 pass during the maps blockout stage, But then have to wait a month or so for the environment art to fill in before doing a v2 pass. And v3 comes at the very end.

Having 1 month to light the map allowed for a quick and more free-form lighting process, and this map was generally just a lot of fun to work on. As a big fan of Halo CE's boarding action, the map's design (done by Cliff Shuldt) really felt like it was a bit of a spiritual reincarnation of its feel.

I was responsible for lighting Chasm, a multiplayer map released with Halo Infinite Season 3. Designated as a "quick-map"-an idea to utilize existing campaign assets to speed up the release of Dev-made maps in the game. Usually it takes ~6 months to light a map depending on size, Chasm was done in 1

Thanks man!!! There's definitely a few areas i wish I had the time for another pass on (had a really fun idea for the lower interior room with the blue lighting/glass windows that i didnt have time to execute on), but I'm happy with the outcome of the map over all!

I always appreciate your kind comments, man! Oasis was definitely my favorite BTB map to play in infinite, so it was easy to get inspired when I was working on it! Glad the end result made people happy

I loved my time on Halo and miss it greatly 💙

In campaign, everything is dynamic. In multiplayer, we would bake static shadows as well as use dynamic casting shadows for important light sources. It's the dynamic shadow casting lights that had the limitations.

This meant we would manually create shadow fade distances so that only lights that are within a certain number of meters from the player camera would render. On an Xbox one this distance may be like 4 meters, on a series x it may be like 20.

More of a limitation on Halo Infinite specifically. We could enable shadow casting lights on multiple lights, but to keep performance optimized we had to limit xbox one SKUs to only rendering 1 of those shadows at a time usually.

This map took quite a while for all of the art/design teams to get from the conception stage to the released product. For lighting, it took roughly 6 months of work time from what I remember. (But that time isn't all spent on this single map, during that 6 months I did other work as well)

Hah! It was not fun lmao. When the OG xbox one can only render 1 casting shadow at a time it becomes quite the puzzle. Luckily the way we established lighting groups helped with scaling our work across multiple platforms of varying quality.

That means so much!!! Thank you sabrina!!

Photography is a great skill to pick up to learn many of the fundamentals of light, composition, value, etc.. Downloading a game engine and lighting various 3D environments, following tutorials, and a bit of schooling is how I learned. Originally i was an environment Artist however.

That's a difficult question to answer. It depends on what sort of environments youre lighting, what style you're working in, and what the technical limitations of your project/game/environment are. If you're passionate about it, there's MANY ways to begin learning lighting.

Thanks friend!

Being one of the largest BTB maps in Halo Infinite- with a large exterior space as well as very large interior locations (caves, blue/red base, center structure) meant there are A LOT of lights in this map. Optimizing their overlap, shadows, and # of lights was a long task to achieve stability

Oasis was one of the Halo Infinite Season 3 maps that I got to light! This one is really close to besting Scarr for the title of "My Favorite Map I Did Lighting For". And Oasis was DEFINITELY the most difficult from an optimization standpoint. (1/2)

Thanks so much @imaximus101.bsky.social ! Glad you found it interesting or en-lightening (heh)!