Learn all about CRYENGINE's industry leading real-time dynamic lighting system with easily digestible tutorials by Learning Manager, Brian Dilg.

Whether you’re starting with game development, or looking for specific topics, our official CRYENGINE YouTube channel is home to a huge range of tutorials which cover a broad spectrum of game design principles and practical techniques. Of course, CRYENGINE is famed for its renderer that powers some of the most beautiful games. Today we present two essential lighting tutorials from our channel, which will help you achieve your vision. Your host for both is our Learning Manager Brian Dilg.

To get the most out of these tutorials, you should be familiar with the basics of game development and using CRYENGINE. If you are completely new to CRYENGINE, we recommend that you download our beginner’s course or watch the tutorial on our YouTube channel.  

Creative Lighting Basics

Learn CRYENGINE’s lighting systems for gameplay, ambiance, and aesthetics and understand creative and technical lighting concepts in just over 45 minutes.  You will be introduced to the core pillars of CRYENGINE’s lighting system, including dynamic light entities, environment probes, and SVOGI, our voxel-based global illumination solution. The tutorial includes practical steps for lighting an area, a discussion of color theory, and shows you how to place different types of lights, and add volumetric fog. By the end of the course, you will have a fully lit level.

The course takes a creative approach to using CRYENGINE’s lighting tools. Where do you place lights in a level? Why would specific light sources be in certain areas? How can you use lighting to guide players through your levels or alert them to threats, goals, and objectives? Demonstrating both how to use the lighting systems and exploring concepts like, for instance, thinking as an architect or interior designer when it comes to placing light sources, the course will leave you able to use CRYENGINE’s real-time lighting system to great effect.

Master lighting components and features that launched in CRYENGINE 5.6

Gain a deeper understanding of CRYENGINE lighting tools, including features from CRYENGINE 5.6. In just under 40 minutes, the tutorial covers a variety of topics, including lighting components, clip volumes, environment probes, projection textures, and more. You will be taken step-by-step through practical examples of how you can use CRYENGINE’s various lighting tools to light your scenes beautifully. The video can be used in conjunction with the CRYENGINE documentation covering Point Light Components and Projector Light Components.

ICYMI, we also have a handy round-up of a range of physics tutorials, hosted by Brian, and a recap of videos which will help you learn character animation in CRYENGINE, presented by Roman Perezogin, one of our Junior Technical Designers.

If you’re looking for more tutorials, don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you have suggestions for tutorials, let us know on the forum, or via Facebook and Twitter. You can ask questions, pick up tips and tricks, and more by joining our community and the CRYENGINE development team over on our official CRYENGINE Discord channel. If you find a bug in the engine, please report it directly on GitHub, which helps us to process the issue quickly and efficiently.

Are you looking for your next career move? At Crytek, we value diversity, and we actively encourage people from all kinds of backgrounds and experience levels to apply to our open positions, so join us over at LinkedIn and check out our careers page.