Real-time lighting
Dynamic and baked lighting workflows, light probe placement, exposure settings, and post-processing stacks for Unreal Engine and Unity environments.
About Sovkrelan
Lighting and texture craft taught online.
Practical instruction for 3D artists building real-time game environments
Sovkrelan focuses on one thing: lighting and texture design for real-time 3D games. Students work through structured programs covering physically-based rendering, baked lighting setups, procedural material creation, and environment art pipelines used in commercial game production.
What we teach
Specific skills,
Specific skills,
real pipelines
The curriculum covers the technical and artistic layers of lighting — from HDR environment setups to dynamic shadow systems in Unreal and Unity. Texture work spans Substance-based PBR workflows, trim sheets, tiling materials, and hand-painted atlases.
Sessions run in small groups or as private lessons. Both formats include live feedback on student work, not just recorded walkthroughs. Instructors review actual files, spot common production errors, and help students adjust their process.
The schedule is flexible — students pick session times across multiple time zones. There's no fixed cohort start date, which means you begin when you're ready and progress without waiting for a group to catch up.
PBR texture authoring
Albedo, normal, roughness, and metallic map creation in Substance Painter and Designer. Focus on readable, memory-efficient assets for game builds.
Environment art
Modular kit construction, trim sheet workflows, tiling material sets, and atmosphere-first scene composition applied to interior and exterior environments.
Live review sessions
Scheduled one-on-one and group critique sessions where instructors review actual project files. Direct feedback on technical choices, not general advice.
How a typical learning path works
1
Skills assessment and program selection
2
First sessions — foundations and tooling setup
3
Project-based work with instructor feedback
4
Focused critique on personal portfolio piece
5
Completion and follow-up access to materials
Darko Velić
Lead Lighting Instructor
Ten years working on lighting for commercial game titles before moving into instruction full time. Focuses on the gap between technically correct setups and visually convincing results — a gap that costs artists significant time without good guidance.
Orsolya Fekete
Texture Design Specialist
Background in surface design for mobile and console environments across multiple shipped titles. Her sessions cover material efficiency and readability — keeping textures visually strong within the memory constraints real production imposes.
Tibor Nădăşan
Environment Art Mentor
Specialises in modular environment construction and scene composition. Works with students on translating concept direction into production-ready sets, covering scene readability from a player perspective alongside technical pipeline concerns.
Ásdís Magnúsdóttir Available for private sessions on request
Procedural Materials Instructor
Runs the Substance Designer track, covering graph-based material authoring from simple tiling patterns to complex layered surfaces. Her approach connects the logic of node graphs to the visual outcomes artists actually need in finished environments.