Game Lighting, Owned End -2-End
by Tech Art Team
WildWorks
NetEase Games
Visual Concepts
Xbox
Steel Wool
Obsidian Entertainment
Super Evil Megacorp
Mythical Games
Hidden Path
inXile Entertainment
Gearbox
Turtle Rock
Name the Machine
K Games
Dreamhaven
Windows
Meta
Hutch
Singularity 6
nWay
Annapurna
Second Dinner
The 3 Things We’d Like you to Know First
Your lighting is run by a Technical Art Team, not a lighting vendor
A Technical Art Director with 18 years, who built his own PBR render engine. A Technical Art Lead with 15 years, out of 4A Games and Wargaming. The people who built these pipelines are the people on your project.
Devoted has owned the full lighting pipeline on an open world title
Sole lighting partner on a shipped UE5 title, no internal lighting artist on the client side. Blockout through final bug fix, held consistent across streamed levels and sub-levels. Every competitor we checked sells lighting artists. We can do that too, or own the result. Tell us which you need.
First production run of MegaLights was ours
Halo: Campaign Evolved, lit end-to-end with the Halo Studios tech art team. Lighting used to guide players, hold combat readability, and carry the scale of the architecture.
Case Study: Lighting Owned Through Every Production Stage
Halo: Campaign Evolved
Devoted role:
- Proxy Lighting: fast iteration on mood & composition
- Artify Lighting: final art direction locked in
- Polish & Optimization: bug-free, ship-ready results
- Embedded team fully integrated
The Leads On Your Project
Jason Millena
Executive Creative Director
Jean-Francois Goulet
Tech Director
Michael Bitsakis
Tech Art Director
Dmytro Vusatyi
Technical Art Lead
Dmytro Yakovenko
VFX Lead
Dmytro Baidachnyi
Lead Technical Artist
The Stack Behind Those Credits
ENGINES
proprietary engines
LIGHTING TECH
baked and dynamic global illumination · lighting Blueprints · post-process and colour grading · HDR
TOOLS
PLATFORMS
Our Tech Art Director Michael Bitsakis wrote his own PBR rendering engine
Michael built Instant Light, with full implementations in Blueprints, C++ and C#, and its own editor tools. If your pipeline needs something that does not exist yet, ask the person who would build it.
Talk to the Lighting Leads
Lighting & Tech Art We've Shipped
The Outer Worlds 2
Dark Pals
Open Roads
Minds Eye
Sunderfolk
YASMIN REGIS, HEAD OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
Houdini in Our Pipeline
Fewer assets built by hand
Cityscapes, landscapes and vegetation are generated rather than modelled one at a time. Optimization happens in the same graph that built the asset, which is how a scene stays cheap enough to light well.
Procedural in your engine, even without it today
Our leads have built Houdini Engine integration from scratch into 2 proprietary engines where no procedural workflow existed before, plus editor tools for baking, painting, mesh editing and generators.
Lighting Technology Backed by Technical Art
When the lighting needs a shader, Blueprint system, Houdini workflow, or editor tool, we don’t lose time waiting for another department. Our lighting and technical art teams work as one production pipeline.
The lighting pass read before materials, where form and contrast get settled.
The final frame running in engine, materials and volumetrics on the same setup.
Lighting setups by our Technical Art Director.
Built for Production, Not for the Screenshot
Lighting Services We Provide
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Environment Lighting
Whole levels lit from blockout to final polish.
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Cinematic Lighting
Sequencer and cutscene lighting that matches the in-game look.
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Character & Gameplay Lighting
Key, fill and rim on characters, readable from cinematic through to gameplay. Players guided to the next point, enemies readable in shadow.
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Time-of-Day & Dynamic GI
Day/night cycles, weather states, sun, skylight and exposure driven by reusable Blueprints. Baked, dynamic or a mix, decided per level.
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End-to-End Lighting
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Open World & Lighting Systems
Reusable lighting Blueprints that hold one look across World Partition cells, streamed sub-levels and HLOD.
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Relighting & Remasters
Next-gen quality that keeps the mood players already know.
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Optimization & Scalability
GPU profiling, light and shadow budgets, VSM, Lumen and MegaLights tuned per scalability tier, with platform-specific fallbacks.
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Post-Process & Colour Grading
Exposure, HDR and grading as the last pass, once lighting is right.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, Devoted has shipped a UE5 open world title as the sole lighting partner, with no internal lighting artist on the client side, and held the look consistent across streamed sub-levels. Ownership means Devoted is accountable for the result from blockout through final bug fixing, not supplying artists into someone else’s lighting team.
Environment lighting, cinematic lighting and gameplay lighting in Unreal and Unity. That includes baked and dynamic setups, reusable lighting systems for consistency across levels, relighting of existing titles, post-process and colour grading, and the optimization work that keeps all of it inside the platform’s budget.
Yes, and it is a distinct discipline. On a remaster the goal is to push visuals to next-gen quality while staying true to the mood, style and intent of the original game. Devoted has done this on Halo: Campaign Evolved and on the Nintendo Switch release of Open Roads.
Roughly 30% of Devoted’s work is porting to demanding platforms, including Switch. Baked versus dynamic, which sources cast shadows, and the material pass underneath are all decided against the target device’s budget from the start. On Open Roads that included an optimized tree system built to hold 30fps.
Unreal, Unity and proprietary engines. Devoted’s technical leads have written shaders inside a proprietary engine and built Houdini Engine integration where none existed, so a non-standard pipeline is a normal starting point rather than a blocker.
Devoted validates lighting in the build, not only in the editor, and turns feedback around quickly. Path visibility and combat readability are held through to final polish, because on most projects lighting is a gameplay system rather than a finishing coat.
The engine and target platforms, where lighting sits in your production schedule, and whether you have lighting in house today or the discipline is currently unowned. That is enough for Devoted to scope a first conversation.