Justine Cannarella, senior lighting artist at Starbreeze

Today we have the pleasure of welcoming Justine Cannarella, senior lighting artist at Starbreeze. This is our chance to talk to Justine about a discipline that is both essential and sometimes overlooked by gamers, through her career path, her vision of the profession and her sensitivity. In this interview, we’ll be looking at both the technological and artistic aspects of lighting, to get a better idea of the issues surrounding this profession. From Backlight to Starbreeze, via Ubisoft, let’s discover Justine’s career path together!

All the game images illustrating Justine’s work are taken from her ArtStation account. We urge you to check it out to find out more about her work. For photography fans, Justine is also a photographer and publishes her photos on her website.

Could you start by introducing yourself? What is your career path and what led you to become a lighting artist?

I’m Justine, I’m 32 and I’ve been working in the video game industry since 2015. As far as my background is concerned, I’ve been immersed in video games since I was very young. I was introduced to them by my dad, who would have loved to work in this field: he still creates a lot of mods for games like Fallout and Total War: Warhammer 3. So I’ve always had a certain affinity with this environment.

Even so, until I went to secondary school, I didn’t know there were any video game schools. I knew I wanted to do something artistic, but for me video games were more of a dream than anything else. Shortly before the baccalaureate, when I was doing some research with the help of my mum, we discovered LISAA, a school in Paris specialising in 2D, 3D and video games. So we submitted my application, I had an interview and the good news was, I’d been accepted! So I was able to do a preparatory year followed by a degree in video games. As I wasn’t ready to enter the world of work and didn’t really know what I wanted to do afterwards, I decided to continue with a degree in 3D and Special Effects, again at LISAA. However, at that stage, I didn’t know that the lighting artist profession existed, so I wasn’t thinking of going down that route. In spite of everything, I think I’ve always had a certain affinity with this speciality: I used to do a lot of character modelling and it was important for me to highlight them using light.

It was during the end-of-year jury that I was spotted by Backlight, a studio specialising in VR, probably because I knew how to work both in real time and pre-calculated. It was at this studio that I learnt everything, discovered the job of lighting artist and specialised in this field. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was going to work on around forty projects (of varying sizes) until January 2022.

Then, during the Covid period, I started to realise that I needed a change, that VR wasn’t an environment that really spoke to me. Shortly after that, I was contacted by Ubisoft Bordeaux for a position as lighting artist on Beyond Good & Evil 2. As I don’t live in Bordeaux and all my family and friends live in and around Paris, I thought long and hard before agreeing to join them. But I’d like to say that I have no regrets today, even though I haven’t been working at Ubisoft for a while now.

I joined Ubisoft in June 2022 and stayed until the end of March 2024. I was lucky enough to work on BGE 2, as mentioned above, as well as Assassin’s Creed Mirage and Assassin’s Creed Shadows. I really enjoyed those almost two years at Ubisoft, not least because I met some incredible people. It was also my first AAA game release. Unfortunately, Ubisoft was perhaps a bit ‘too big’ for me, I had trouble with some of the choices that were made and I wasn’t really fulfilled in what I was doing any more. Even though I wasn’t planning to leave, I was contacted by Starbreeze and, encouraged by my friends and family, I embarked on this new recruitment process. They made me an offer just before Christmas. So I’ve been working at the studio since 1 April and what I can say today is that I’ve finally rediscovered the love I had for lighting.

Could you tell us about a game that has made an impression on you recently, whether it’s related to your job or not?

A game that’s made an impression on me recently, and I’m not going to be original here, is Baldur’s Gate 3. I’ve been a huge RPG fan ever since I was a kid: I started with The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and I think I was barely 10 at the time. What I’m looking for in a game is emotion, immersion and being able to escape into a fictional world for a few hours. Larian fulfils all these criteria with Baldur’s Gate and I’m really impressed by the monstrous work produced by the developers. I tend never to play a game again once I’ve finished it… and yet I’ve played Baldur’s Gate 3 more than 8 times! As for the last graphical slap in the face I got, it was Cyberpunk 2077, which I found really incredible. I must have spent a good third of my 200 hours playing in photo mode.

Could you tell us a bit more about your job as a lighting artist, in particular what you do on a day-to-day basis and how you go about lighting a game? What tools do you use? What are they used for?

First of all, it’s important to realise that the job of lighting artist is, after all, a fairly recent one in the world of video games, and there are still quite a few studios today that don’t have lighting artists: it’s the environment artists who take care of the lighting in these studios. There’s a misconception that a lighting artist is only useful at the end of production, when the level art is quite advanced. But the lighting artist is important from pre-production onwards. At this stage, there will be a great deal of research into the types of light props that will be used in the game, because depending on the period and the universe, you obviously won’t have the same ones. We can also start by doing test scenes in the engine where we’ll work on different atmospheres. We’ll also be able to configure our famous light props by managing the lighting parameters and checking that everything works with our atmospheres. It’s also during pre-production that we’ll be asking ourselves the following questions: will there be a day/night cycle or will we have a ‘time of day’ fix? What are the gameplay elements that will require lighting work to ensure consistency and understanding? This is also the time when we can identify potential problems and start looking for solutions.

Later, during production, it’s important to be able to synchronise with the concept artists, level artists and level designers, and to know everyone’s intentions because, as well as having an aesthetic and artistic aspect, lighting is also there to serve the gameplay and narrative. So when I’m working on my lighting, I make sure I see where the points of interest are and then I think about how to highlight these elements to guide the player while creating coherent lighting. Another important element in this job is optimisation. Lighting can be extremely demanding in terms of performance, so it’s something we pay a lot of attention to. There is often an optimisation phase at the end of production.

As far as the tools are concerned, I always use what’s already built into the engine, whether it’s Unreal Engine or Anvil (for Ubisoft). For the lights themselves, we’ll have different ones to use depending on the situation, for example, the omni which can emit light in all directions or the spot which, as its name suggests, will act like a spotlight! We also have what we call the post-process, where we can work on colourimetry and exposure. We also use fog, which we can adjust to a greater or lesser extent depending on the mood we want to create.

As well as the artistic dimension, there’s also a strong technological dimension to your work. Could you tell us about the different technological tools you use? What are the specific features of the different technologies you’ve worked with (Lumen, RTX, etc.)? What are the technological developments associated with your job and what impact do they have on the way you approach your discipline?

The job of lighting artist is also quite technical. Personally, I have much more of an affinity with the artistic side of the job, but it’s essential to have some more technical grounding, particularly in terms of optimisation. For example, when I worked in VR, I had to find solutions that allowed me to keep the lighting credible and beautiful while optimising the rendering so that the game worked in VR.

These days, with the next/new gen, there’s a growing desire to make very realistic games, and that means a lot of lighting. Generally, to keep performance stable and games fluid, we ‘bake’ our lights. To put it simply, we run a calculation that makes our lights and shadows ‘static’, as if we were printing the shadows directly into the texture. This ‘baking’ will also allow us to calculate the bounces of light, known as ‘global illumination’ (GI for short). I’m sure many people have already realised in a game that their character doesn’t necessarily have a shadow when passing near a light. This is precisely because the light has been ‘baked’ (or the shadows have been deactivated). The more dynamic the lights in our game, the more it will consume. And sometimes you may need to leave dynamic lights where you have to deactivate the shadows to avoid performance problems. In general, this concerns fairly decorative lights (fire on torches or candles, for example). When it comes to the sun or the moon, we’ll make sure to keep the dynamic aspect and therefore to have the shadows of our characters and other moving objects in order to have something credible. But even here, an optimisation pass is important.

Then, a few years ago, raytracing arrived. It’s still an ultra-greedy technology, but when you have the hardware to run it, it’s still a hell of a visual slap in the face. For my part, apart from a few personal projects that weren’t necessarily optimised, I’ve never had the opportunity to work with raytracing, so I don’t have all the knowledge to talk about it properly. But there are a lot of superb documentations online for those who are interested.

And the last little revolution is the arrival of lumen with Unreal Engine 5, which gives you global illumination and completely dynamic reflections. The advantage of lumen is that it’s much lighter than raytracing, even if certain optimisations are still essential if we want to satisfy as many players as possible and adapt to a wider choice of machines than if we were using raytracing, which is much more demanding. Personally, I really like working with lumen, it’s very pleasant and at the same time saves an enormous amount of time to be able to see all your lighting change and react to every little parameter change, without having to go through the baking process I mentioned earlier.

What did your experience as a 3D artist bring to your career? Is this experience a prerequisite for becoming a lighting artist?

As I explained in my presentation, during my studies, and even a little afterwards, I was completely unaware of the existence of the lighting artist profession. So I started out as a ‘generalist’ 3D artist, because on the whole that meant I could do a bit of everything (modelling, texturing, integration, but also lighting) and that was the aim of my internship at the time, especially as I didn’t feel I was good enough in any particular field to specialise, and I still had a lot to learn.

I wouldn’t say today that you need to be a 3D artist before becoming a lighting artist, but I do think it’s really important to know how 3D works, and the textures and materials that will react to light. It’s clear that having worked in 3D helps me a great deal today in terms of understanding how I light. So I’d say that, at the very least, it’s a good idea to find out how the different materials in a scene react to light, especially nowadays when we’re trying more and more to achieve the most realistic renderings possible by using physically correct/real values (PBR).

You’re also a photographer. Does photography help you in your job as a lighting artist? How does that come into play?

Photography helps me a lot in my job and lighting also helps me with photography, the two are very closely linked. In fact, I don’t think I know any lighting artists who don’t do a bit of photography. When you take a photo, there are all sorts of parameters to manage that we also have to manage when we create an atmosphere in Unreal Engine, like exposure for example. There’s also all the post-process work involved in both areas (colourimetry, white balance, contrast management, etc.). And of course, photography allows you to work on your eye and your sense of composition, which is also very important in lighting.

You worked at Ubisoft, a company that operates as a department (storytelling, etc.). To what extent is your work impacted by other professions?

As you say, there are different teams at Ubisoft, each with their own specialisation, and lighting is often what we call the end of the line. As a result, our work is often more or less impacted when there’s a change in one or more of the teams before ours. Generally speaking, we wait until we have a finished version of the level design and a base of level art before we start to work on it. And it often happens that changes in LD and/or LA require us to modify/correct our lighting. That’s why communication is really important, because sometimes, without it, you end up with surprises during production. But I was lucky enough to work with people who were easy to communicate with, so any potential changes were discussed beforehand and then I was able to deal with them quickly on my end.

As part of your experience at Ubisoft, you worked on Beyond Good and Evil 2 and Assassin’s Creed Mirage, two open worlds. What are the challenges associated with working on open-world experiences?

I’m not going to be able to say much about BGE2, as the project is still at a confidential stage. For Mirage, I’d say that the challenges are mainly linked to what I said in the previous question. In itself, I didn’t feel any real challenges in terms of working in an open world, or they were more technical challenges linked to the fact that there’s a day/night cycle and that when we were working on lighting and ‘baking’ our lights, we had to make sure that we didn’t have any visual bugs at each time of the cycle. But to come back to the challenges linked to the previous question, I’d say that without good communication, it can be very easy to miss a torch that’s no longer very well placed, because a wall has potentially changed for example. Fortunately, our QAs are there to spot this kind of problem, but in an open world, with hundreds of people working on it, it’s true that you can miss a lot of little problems if some people forget to communicate any changes to the environment.

To what extent does a given artistic direction influence the work of a lighting artist? If so, what are the differences in your work?

I haven’t necessarily talked about it before, but artistic direction is obviously a very important element in lighting. We need a clearly communicated artistic direction so that we can be sure we’re going in the right direction when we start working on an atmosphere. For example, with Assassin’s Creed Mirage, we had to work on different areas, each with its own specific atmosphere (rich/poor or industrial districts, more outlying and desert areas, etc.) and we also had instructions on what kind of ‘light props’ we could place in these different areas. All this is put in place by the art direction. In fact, as a lighting artist, it’s mainly the art director or the art director that we ask for feedback on our work, in my experience. That said, the AD doesn’t necessarily influence the way I work, it’s mainly purely artistic instructions and feedback. And despite that, I always feel free to make suggestions during my tests and to have a certain creative freedom. I’d like to thank all the ADs I’ve worked with for that!

You now work at Starbreeze Entertainment, in a remote position. How does that translate into your day-to-day work? Is it more difficult to fit your work into a project when you’re not working alongside these colleagues?

Overall, I don’t feel that it’s more complicated in terms of the work itself. Communication is still really important, whether you’re in remote or not. We have quite a few meetings to keep each other up to date, and there are also various discussion channels where we can share our progress or ask questions if we need to. Everyone at Starbreeze is very friendly and I can feel everyone’s desire to do things well.

The hardest part for me is the first few days in the studio or when you change projects. Onboarding isn’t as easy as when you can talk directly to your colleagues next to you. It takes a bit of patience to feel really integrated and to get to grips with the projects and the way of working. But you get there in the end!

It is, however, important to maintain a social life outside of work. For my part, I try to go out whenever I can and I continue to see old colleagues and friends from Ubisoft.

Finally, I’d like to point out that I still have a lot to learn in my job and that even after 9 years in the industry, I’m still learning something new every day. Technologies evolve, as do ways of working, and that makes this job, and video games jobs in general, really interesting!

In conclusion, I’d like to point out that all these answers are based on my own experience and feelings, but that not every studio or person works in the same way.

Once again, we’d like to thank Justine for her time and trust.