Check out how two artists, Caspar Helling and Verena Gruse, took CRYENGINE's lighting tools for an impressive spin.

Caspar Helling and Verena Gruse are two artists who have collaborated on a project to create a beautiful Victorian Room scene with CRYENGINE, which you can check out on ArtStation. The assets were created in 3ds Max, Marmoset Toolbag and Substance Painter, and rendered in CRYENGINE. The scene is dripping in atmosphere, packed with beautiful, detailed props, and makes excellent use of lighting to evoke the grand beauty and opulence of a Victorian-era dining room and snug. 

You can check out an in-depth interview with Caspar and Verena on 80 Level, in which they discuss how they approached the project, including preparation, asset production, texturing, setting up the lighting, their experience using CRYENGINE, and more. 

In the interview, they reveal why thy they chose CRYENGINE for the project: “Our main goal was to create a room that invites the viewers, draws their attention to all the little details and therefore encourages their desire to explore further. It was clear then that the lighting would play a big role in reaching that goal. As CRYENGINE offers some great tools for lighting with which you can achieve some stunning results, it was our first choice for the Victorian Room.”

The interview also reveals how they used the CRYENGINE Marketplace to source props, and they describe their workflow for creating assets in different programs alongside a detailed description of how they set up the lighting in CRYENGINE. 

Caspar and Verna also discussed what features and tools in CRYENGINE made the difference for them: “What we like most about CRYENGINE is the outstanding photo-realism and its way of handling lighting. Since we wanted to do a highly detailed, realistic, and cinematic scene, CRYENGINE was the perfect fit. The usage of all the visual features is very straightforward and gives instant comparable results. The easy-to-use environment editor with settings for the time of day gives great results in a short amount of time. Another nice thing about CRYENGINE is a very easy and self-explanatory material editor and interface in general. There is mostly no need for complex and time-consuming material setups, so as an artist you can really focus on creating art. You can basically say that “what you see is what you get.”

“The most interesting thing about using CRYENGINE is lighting. Its Global Illumination approach (SVOTI) is great for artists and lets you create quick and cinematic results. You can choose between a lot of different settings, which have a big impact on the lighting quality and workflow. Another great thing is that the lighting is rendered in real-time without any need of pre-baked lightmaps. So, there is no need for a second UV channel for any lightmaps. Another interesting thing is the heavy use of console commands - the cvars. You can adjust nearly every setting by typing these commands into the console.” 

Read the excellent article over on 80 Level for the full lowdown on this fantastic scene and get a host of practical tips that will help anyone interested in using lighting in CRYENGINE. You can also check out their topic on the Victorian Room project the CRYENGINE forum and start a discussion!

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