Real-time cinematic shot lighting in the order: 1886

The rendering and content-creation pipelines from The Order: 1886 were built from the ground up to deliver a seamless, real time experience across both gameplay and cinematics, and achieve a visual fidelity in real-time that is generally more associated with traditionally pre-rendered CG. A key ingredient in delivering on these ambitions was a system of camera-based shot lighting developed for use in shot-locked cinematic sequences, which all used a much more highly directed and polished dynamic lighting setup, tailored precisely to each camera cut. This demonstration shows a cinematic sequence running live on a PlayStation 4 and then unlocks the camera on the debug build to show the same sequence again from the perspective of what is happening behind the scenes, as the engine is rapidly sequencing composed groups of lights from a collection of hundreds and even thousands of dynamic lights in the scene, each tailored exactly to the actor's performance and camera framing in each shot. The end result in the game sequence is a highly polished and cohesive cinematic that seamlessly blends into gameplay and, from the perspective of the debug camera, looks quite ridiculous.