Mass Effect Andromeda: Lighting and Grading

2017

Lighting technology

Mass Effect: Andromeda used the Enlighten lighting system, and I was the primary tech art contact for debugging artist issues related to Enlighten.

For performance reasons, most of the game environment used Static Enlighten lighting bakes. Each game asset needed Enlighten geometry to be authored according to specific standards. If there were errors in the Enlighten geo, dark patches or light leaking would be visible in game environments.

In order to speed up the manual process of checking and fixing geo, I wrote a content validation script that checked for common Enlighten setup errors and flagged them to the dev team.

HDR Tech

Mass Effect: Andromeda was on the cutting edge of HDR technology when it was released. I was part of a small team working on lighting and grading to ensure that the art looked stunning on TV’s and monitors that supported HDR imaging. HDR – High Dynamic Range – tech dramatically improves details in the brightest and darkest areas of an image, allowing for an extra punch to sunlight, explosions and other visual effects.

We had to tune our visual effects differently for standard screens and HDR setups, so that they took advantage of the HDR range without getting blown out on standard monitors. I was responsible for testing and troubleshooting effects on the HDR screens and adjusting the LUTs accordingly.

It’s difficult to demonstrate the difference because an HDR image won’t display on a regular monitor. Even HDR monitors have varying color gamut sizes depending on monitor quality, so some will appear more vivid than others.

This article from PCGamesN goes into some more detail on the difference.

Hazard Effects

I also worked on screen space effects for when the player is affected by toxic atmospheric conditions on alien planets. When the player first arrives in the Andromeda galaxy, the planets where they land are inhospitable, and part of the goal of the game is to heal them.

Hazard effects include heat, cold, electrical discharge, toxic gas and radiation. Each one changes the LUT to tint the screen with a different color profile. I created the initial color LUTs for the hazard effects using DaVinci Resolve, which were further tuned by the art director.

I handled the gameplay hookups to make the hazard effects appear at the right times. The tinting gradually increases as life support becomes depleted, so in its initial state it needed to clearly differentiate from the norm without being strong enough to annoy the player. In its later stages it needed to be obvious and urgent. I created shader logic to multiply the screen effect parameters in different degrees against the hazard base color.