Ruined Train station- udk Lighting question

badger5

Hello, I have been working on this scene and I am trying to fix the lighting and shadows and give it a better presentation, what would be the best thing for me to do in this situation? I added a second light and it threw everything off. Right now I have a world light above the scene and colored shadow. Any critiqe or advice otherwise is welcome as I am trying to get it to a level to put on my portfolio and apply to studios.

daivdm

Your Scene looks pretty cool. I have not updated in a while. However I think the normals on your grass could use some tweaking a bit. Here is a great Tut I came across recently http://wypierpapier.blogspot.com/search/label/tutorial. Gave me a great insight on vertex normals dealing with grass. Keep rocking I will be firing my creative engines in an hour...lol good luck.:thumbup::)

HakiMaterial

Your environment is nice. You should get rid of your second light for now and make your main light a dominant directional light. Then turn on "Use Global Illumination" under the world properties tab and mess with the light mass settings to your liking. Your dominant directional light should now bounce lighting around the environment without the need of a second light since it's an outdoor scene and the sun seems to be your only source of lighting. Remember to add a light mass importance volume using the builder brush so it calculates lighting only in the area that you want. Add a post processing effect at the end by using the builder brush, world properties, or in the post process chain in the generic browser. It will give you better results like blooming out the lighting edges.

badger5

I did what you sugested and there is more bloom also,it softens the shadows well.What do you think?thank you for the advice=)

Hourences

Enable Environment Color in world properties, and set it to a blueish/blueish purple color.
Turn on Cascaded Shadow Maps on dom dir light.
Desaturate 10% or so in post process. Overlay a bit of a color with LUT/highlights.
Do all your meshes have proper lightmap setups and such? Some of it is very blurry or looks almost unlit.
Adding a sky would help a lot also.

badger5

I changed the lightmaps, I am following the tutorial for the grass and I will test it more.

HakiMaterial

Try to up the lightmap resolution to 32 or 64 in the concrete barriers properties and do another render see if there's a difference. If it's not the light map it could be the indirect light in your dominant directional light that's blowing out your shadows. Try to lower it a bit.

badger5

Sorry about the image size but I thought I would show a update of what I have been working on, a friend on the site yesterday helped me out alot understand the lighting of unreal and how to make better use of shadows.