[UE4] Learning Lighting Art
greentooth
Hi everyone
I thought I'd put this topic together - just a collection of the Lighting/Re-Lighting projects I've taken on recently. Some of the environments were free to download, some I bought from the Marketplace, stripped out the lights/postfx, lit (usually in a different mood), etc...
Links to the original scenes included on each project, as well as Lighting Only shots from Unreal
Wiktor Ohman's Deus Ex Corridor
Realistic Rendering Demo Scene - Fincher/Cronenweth style
Liam Tart's Sci-Fi Bunk - Cyberpunk City style, Only God Forgives/Blade Runner 2049 Colours
Victorian Dining Room - THIEF/Penny Dreadful style
I thought I'd put this topic together - just a collection of the Lighting/Re-Lighting projects I've taken on recently. Some of the environments were free to download, some I bought from the Marketplace, stripped out the lights/postfx, lit (usually in a different mood), etc...
Links to the original scenes included on each project, as well as Lighting Only shots from Unreal
Wiktor Ohman's Deus Ex Corridor
Realistic Rendering Demo Scene - Fincher/Cronenweth style
Liam Tart's Sci-Fi Bunk - Cyberpunk City style, Only God Forgives/Blade Runner 2049 Colours
Victorian Dining Room - THIEF/Penny Dreadful style
Replies
Aside from a couple of prolific lighting guys it seems like Lighting Art is kinda rare on AS, so I'm hoping to start something of a trend, so we see more stuff like this
I think my re-light of the Bunk has had very mixed responses. Like marmite. I really like the saturated coloured lighting in Only God Forgives and the Blade Runner 2049 trailer, and it gives the re-light a distinct look, but some people have said it takes away from the original materials and textures. but on the other hand, I feel like the re-lights I've done with more neutral colours don't have as much of their own identity.
But either way I'm gonna keep practising - the trick is to find Marketplace environments that are high-quality, reasonably optimised, and that I haven't already re-lit...
I don't know, I think it's a little bit of preference too. I'm personally drawn toward bright colors, high contrast, moar-bloom types of environment - like the cauldron Sigma in Horizon Zero Dawn. Your sci-fi bunk may be dramatic but it appeals to me because it feels cinematic. I'd actually like to see the UE4 living room environment with a treatment similar to the other ones. That could be pretty cool.
Either way, I'm looking forward to seeing more!
I guess this is sort of John Wick, sort of Trainspotting 2? I love what you can do with Lighting Channels in Unreal.
(Apologies for awful facebook compression)
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/rnJbO<br><br>So far I'm working on architectural & prop elements, and a base pass of lights to get the basic shapes and fill down, then I'll be extensively using LightFunctions to get the brighter, more refined layer of lighting in
It's easy to imagine that these kinds of scenes are super simple and easy, but replicating the look of the actual installations as much as I can is challenging. A quick almost-copy would be pretty easy to practically anyone who has used an engine before, but it's all the little things that add difficulty - getting rid of bounce lighting that is making a ceiling too bright and distracting, making sure reflections look good, making sure fill lights don't have visible source reflections that break immersion, etc...
The bulk of the work is done, textured some background props such as off light fixtures and vent tubing, made the textures for focal point emissives and lightfunctions.
At this point I have one postprocess volume just locking exposure and doing quality-of-life things for me like disabling motion blur. Plan is to give each room another volume to control the colour grading and such.
The realistic apartment demo would be one to recommend, since there are lots of apartment scenes in cinema that are all different, so the setting is very versatile.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/4gm9l
Before:
And after (WIP):
It would be great to hear your thoughts on how you approached the re-lighting workflow-wise!
Since we're not talking just lighting but also materials and postprocessing, which albeit go hand-in-hand, I wonder if you tweak all these things as you go or if you have a more linear process of creating all the lights first and then going over onto the materials?
How often do you bake the lights with lightmass? I think a lot of people, including myself, get stuck in tweaking lights slightly and then having to wait 15-30 minutes to see the change while the lights bake. ^^
How would you generally approach lighting an environment like this. Start by blocking out the actual light-sources in the scene and try to keep it simple as long as possible before adding fill-lights etc?
Interrogation complete! ^^
I try to do things one-at-a-time, but I'm not too strict with myself. E.g. first thing I'll do in a re-light is find something emissive or a window to be the dominant source for the room/area. Get that roughly lit and then if I find some materials don't work well with it because they could be improved, I'll edit or replace them as I need to. In the Research Center I found myself tweaking mask intensity, roughness values, etc a lot, and also I like to make sure no textures are too dark, as it's generally better to work with low contrast so you can handle it with lighting & post.
I will usually add in the dominant light actors, see what the results are like, then add in some fill lights. I leave rim lights until the very end, so I can just easily set some props to receive Channel 2 lighting, then add in some Channel 2 only lights with no GI. Just for accents
In terms of bake times, I feel like I know my way around using Lightmass quite well by now. So I have no issue setting the lighting scale to 2 or 4 at preview quality to get quick bake times, as I more or less know that I only need to crank up the quality scales at the end. There are loads of lightmass settings as I'm sure you know, some of them (such as that Scale control) are super useful for getting quicker turnarounds.
Weirdly enough, when I was making my third Lighting Installations scene (with the big triangular prism) I placed fill lights first, because I knew that I needed to spend the most time on getting them right, getting the balance of light and dark I wanted, making sure not too much GI light was making the ceiling look super bright (a very common irritation when lighting in game engines).
Thanks a lot, totally even forgot UE4 has lighting channels now! Using that for detail and control sounds really smart, I'm going to push my luck here and ask another super specific question ^^
Do you have any rule of thumb when working with reflection captures?
Starting off with a big box-capture whilst doing the general lighting, or adding in more and more smaller spheres for better local reflection quality etc?
Personally I don't find that I get good results from the box captures, so I use a good amount of the spheres. I'll start with one large one, and try to evenly space smaller-radius spheres around the room/area (so it ends up looking like GI probes) - and a lot of the time I'm OK with turning down the captured cubemap resolution.
Then if I notice any areas with weird-coloured reflections, or any innacuracies, etc I'll place another capture in that area and dial in the radius as I see fit
You can kinda see in this image I have some pretty evenly spaced sphere captures:
I'd really like to see a timelapse of one of these or even a bit of work on it! (deus ex one I'd vote as it uses light textures I'm not very familiar with!) But just reading you two discussing just above already taught me lots, love this thread!
Hey question, have you ever wondered or maybe does it exist already in ue4
Some kind of light that affects the shader and could edit a roughness map for example
Sometimes the lighting/environment at some spot of the game will make some material react great, while at some other locations you gotta tweak the light or material or both to get what you want (manual shot specific tweaks for instance)
Imagine some kind of light that also edit the roughness maps of what it touches ? Would that look weird maybe. Or maybe it'd be fine if you just edit with very small values, just enough to make whatever you want shine more or less.
I don't know.
Thought about it as it happens to me very often on a project and seeing your before/after research center pics (great job!)
Some reflections got blown out by some intensity and bounce increases
This room needs a lot of work, it's very WIP - the floor tiles have an update to the roughness in progress, and I need to make some designer furniture to highlight on the carpet
EDIT:
and in case anyone is interested in looking at any other examples of lighting art I've found to be good ref or inspiration, this stuff is pretty nice to study:
https://www.artstation.com/geoffroycalis
Breakdown of lighting process:
Reference:
(ignore low-res bake quality)
Reference:
http://www.ashtailor.co.uk/selected-work/
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Plan is to have a fixture on the side of the large switchboard or whatever to the right that is the main source, a spinning siren sort of thing attached to the junction box on the left, and a green exit sign above the back door - low intensity but high range and GI contribution
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Plus now I know the limitations of emissive planes in UE4, I know better when/where to use them
The precision of the bake is amazing!
RE bleeding - I find if you're careful you can avoid bleeding. E.g. if I have a group of light fixtures in the same room (like the example above) I like to have the immediate spot lighting as all separate lights with sensible attenuation and no GI, then I can control bounced/indirect/fill light of the entire bank of lights from one nearby non-inverse-square omni
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Thread
Do you usually start the scenes with a set plan or is it lots of experimenting?
I've included some of these annotations in a new relight of the Medieval Interior Set on the UE4 marketplace:
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