Forest Lighting - Need Feedback
Hello,
I started working on this game environment in UE4 a while back to learn about foliage/vegetation. Now I'm almost finished with it, but for final presentation (which is WIP) I'm not sure if the lighting is catchy enough. I feel like there's room for improvement, but I don't see it. My current setup is:
Movable directional light
Movable skylight + White cubemap (because I don't want blue shadows)
PPV + Cubemap + LPVs
Atmospheric fog
Exponential height fog
Do you have any suggestions that could improve the lighting without adding any other type of lights?
Thanks in advance.
I started working on this game environment in UE4 a while back to learn about foliage/vegetation. Now I'm almost finished with it, but for final presentation (which is WIP) I'm not sure if the lighting is catchy enough. I feel like there's room for improvement, but I don't see it. My current setup is:
Movable directional light
Movable skylight + White cubemap (because I don't want blue shadows)
PPV + Cubemap + LPVs
Atmospheric fog
Exponential height fog
Do you have any suggestions that could improve the lighting without adding any other type of lights?
Thanks in advance.
Replies
I've spent several months on building this and I'm too picky on the lighting now. I hope it's fine. Doesn't look realistic though.
The only crit I have at the moment is about the god rays. Something about them still feels off to me, I think it's the overall sharpness of them or their intensity. Maybe they look better in motion. Are they cards and have you tried the new atmospheric fog?
At a glance I think the god rays may be too think and spread out, sharp like leleuxart mentioned. I can look and pick all of them out, which looks kind of "game-y". I think god rays are a hard sell at this camera angle, but I like them more than not. I would just expect to see broader strokes of light from the small god rays in the bg to some larger, bigger falloff rays in the foreground, if that makes sense.
leleuxart, Went ahead and checked out the light beams in CE as planned. I've reworked my light rays shader. Here's some pics with the new shader (5 material instances for different looking beams). Looks quite tasty in motion.
It seems 1 and 3 also lost the sharp white highlights, which makes sense if they were specular, but I'd like to see them at more angles if possible. That might just be me though.
I did a bit more work here. I have a cylinder and material has 2 sided checked off, so with that I don't need to have it always face the camera. There are two problems with this though, A) If the texture isn't tileable along the X, you will see different results when you view the cylinder from different sides and B| If the texture is tiled around the cylinder you see hard edges along the cylinder sides where light is suddenly cut off.
To fix that I used the Fresnel node to generate a mask on the cylinder sides and made the mask stronger by doing some adjustments, but couldn't adjust it to an acceptable state. It looks fine from close up but from a distance you still get to see a hard cut.
Couldn't make the mask (red) softer towards the center. I'm not sure how Crytek managed to fix that. But I'm gonna go back to 2 sided plane again and try to improve that instead. Meanwhile if there are any ways to soften that mask towards the center I'm all ears. Will post the 2 sided plane results here again for feedback as well.
I think the light rays in the background read a bit better compared to old ones.
ikbluThe clover cluster I'm using on the ground is 224 Tris.