Tom Bentkowski
Senior Lighting Artist
Tom is a Senior Lighting Artist with experience gathered in various Art departments for the last 10 years. He started his adventure as a Digital Artist, creating illustrations for board and card games and then discovered the exciting world of 3D graphics. Shortly after, he started to work in advertising and product design before switching to his real passion - Game Development.
Before specializing in the Art of Lighting, he was responsible for many branches of games' visual aspects, from Environment Art to VFX and Animation in both Unity and Unreal Engine. He worked as a Lecturer, teaching young people about all the aspects of game development. For a little over 2 years he was working as Environment Artist in the movie industry, providing real time backgrounds for LED Volumes.
As a Lighting Artist he worked on Observer: System Redux, upcoming horror Layers of Fear: Horror Reimagined and the most recent chapter in his beloved franchise - Star Wars Jedi: Survivor. Tom's personal work has been recognized with the title of Artist Of the Year 2019 on Unreal Engine's subreddit or the more recent one - Better Light Than Never, an Unreal Engine Lighting Art contest.
He constantly seeks for new challenges and ways of expression. He is passionate about visual aspects of storytelling, making believable, deep environments and lighting while being aware of the workflows of all the other departments, he is constantly pushing for cinematic feeling that fits the gameplay design and mechanics, believing that Lighting is one of the most significant tool in Art that helps to gather and deliver the emotions in the presented stories.
Lighting Mentorship
This mentorship covers 5 hours of fully personalized one-on-one sessions, which are carefully adjusted to uncover the best road to reach your goals. Together we will track down the current obstacles and discuss how to overcome them in a way that will prepare for the ones that will come in the future.
We will make a deep dive into the Art of Light, how to work with Art Direction, gather references, set the mood, how to use lighting as a storytelling tool, understand how lighting expands other branches of art and depends on them. We will discuss how to gather feedback and prepare your work for pitches and presentations. In our sessions we will cover the full development workflows and last but not least - how to overcome technical and mental boundaries.
The mentorship is designed to help break through plateaus, build confidence, increase technical aptitude, and provide a clear path of continued growth and success.
Learning Focus
Realtime lighting workflows un Unreal Engine
Matter of lighting in storytelling
Composition and readability
Ideas and final work presentations
Cinematic lighting and sequencer workflows
Understanding of scene creation processes
