The Last of Us.

Vivian Ding - Lead Lighting artist. Leandro Amaral - Lighting Artist

There’s a whole team of artists who perfect the lighting within the game. Every time you seen a torch being used by the Joel or the other characters, the light has to interact with the surroundings as you’d expect from the real world.

In the documentary about Naughty Dog, we see a lighting artist talking about how he would go out and take photos of the day with his phone so that he could get an accurate representation of the mellow light in the early morning. By doing this, you build up a picture of how the colours of the shadows and the light changes across the day.

With the game being set in a post-apocalyptic world, we see a lot of ambient light being used throughout the game. The insides of the buildings during the day still need to be lit, but they’re shadowy and dingy. Shadows are also crucial to making the game look as realistic as possible. The lighting artists made sure that when characters are walking down corridors, they still have shadows that follow them through the hallways. The main artists work separately and their work is sent to the lighting artists. Everything is worked on by specific teams.