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Light color vs texture vs color correction

polycounter lvl 6
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Ashaman73 polycounter lvl 6
I have an issue with my light colors interfering with my textures. The light color is like a color filter and when the environment color is similar to the environment texture, everything is ok. But if I want to add some contrast colors in the environment the colored lights desaturate/darken them too much. It is really hard to predict the outcome of a texture which has i.e. a contrast color.

So, how to best change the mood of the environment ? Should I try to apply most of the mood color to the textures and use almost neutral colors ? Should I use a post-process color correction ? Or should I use neutral textures and colored lights ?

Here is an example of a sewer tunnel (reddish/green) and an orange light source with 0% saturation (top), 50% (middle) and 100% (bottom). The shift of the mood is clear (from cold to warm).

light_color.jpg

Replies

  • wes.sau
    If you're using Unreal I'd use the Post Processing options with less saturated lighting, maybe your middle screenshot. Because it's dynamic you can experiment quickly to find what you're looking for without having to sink time on rebaking lighting or reimport textures. Also with PP being dynamic means you can have it change over time.

    However the PP only enhances what it has to work with. The stronger the texturing and lighting foundation, the more rich the post processing results can look. Here's some advice on textures and lighting:

    If you get hung up color correcting a texture to compensate for lighting in a specific scene then you might have to duplicate that texture and tweak it again elsewhere for other lighting cases. At my previous company I created a reference lighting level for our artists to use to create their textures. No colored lights, just white with the full range of light intensity expected in the game. It was mostly to get the all the artists making textures in the same luminance, but also to help make it easier to match diffuse up to reference and to match or compliment with other diffuse textures in a set and is also easier to dial colors and saturation without the bias of a colored light.

    If you have a couple post processing settings you like you can add post processing volumes or kismet triggers to the reference level to switch between them and the neutral lighting. Also fog can affect the colors and mood as well, wich you can trigger also.

    Also when creating a reference level in UDK note that if you use one of Epics startup map templates to be sure to zero out all the post processing options and clear out the lookup table in the worldinfo, otherwise your reference lighting will still be biased. Your texture in the reference level should look the same as in the content browser, only lighter/darker based on light intensity.


    Hope you find this "levels you up".
  • wes.sau
    And about your question about colored lights, personally I like to start with lights fairly neutral or just warm or cool enough for separation when both warm and cool are in the same scene, like overcast lighting coming through a window in a dark room with a lamp on. This gives enough separation for Post Processing to do things like push all the warms to be brighter (or more orange, in your case) and all the cools to be more saturated and slightly darker, for example.

    What I like about keeping the lighting closer to neutral tends to let the stronger saturated diffuse colors of surface materials bounce in the scene instead of washing a solid light color over everything (depending on what you're going for you might want that though), and neutral light intensities give the post processing a larger range of possibilities, feeding in more texture colors to work with rather than one light color over the whole scene.
  • Ashaman73
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    Ashaman73 polycounter lvl 6
    Thank you wes.sau, you helped me very much. Sometimes you don't see the wood for the trees. Your advices are exactly what I'm looking for.

    I'm not using UDK, but I can switch the light colors etc. quite quickly. Your advice about the test level using neutral lights with different intensities and your general workflow (push textures with neutral light conditions -> push environment with careful adjustment of light colors -> finalize it with post processing color correction) are really helpful !
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