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[UE4] Learning Lighting Art

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greentooth
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FULGORE 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


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  • Anngelica
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    Anngelica polycounter lvl 10
    Ah, I love this stuff! I've actually been working on a re-light of that victorian scene myself, so this is inspiring! I really like the colors in the Sci-Fi bunk. It has great atmosphere, like the Deus Ex Corridor. Awesome stuff.
  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    Anngelica said:
    Ah, I love this stuff! I've actually been working on a re-light of that victorian scene myself, so this is inspiring! I really like the colors in the Sci-Fi bunk. It has great atmosphere, like the Deus Ex Corridor. Awesome stuff.
    Thanks :) started following you on AS.
    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...
  • Anngelica
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    Anngelica polycounter lvl 10

    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!
  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    Since I kind of ran out of viable Marketplace scenes, I figured I'd have time over the weekend to quickly whip up a simple mini scene just for trying out a particular mood/palette :)

    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)



  • FULGORE
  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    By chance I found some cool inspiration - a lighting art/audio-visual-interactive studio Nonotak, so I'm making a few fairly simple rooms (environment art wise) and trying to replicate some of the lighting I've seen in their lighting art installations (and some others):







    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...


  • Finalhart
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    Finalhart polycounter lvl 6
    This is awesome! Lightning is such a complex subject and very rewarding once you start getting the hang of it
  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    Update on the Nontak-inspired installations (Lighting Only view):

    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.



  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    Room 1 update - it has its own Postprocess vol :D - colour correction, slight DoF, increased vignette, slight gamma manipulation of shadows, and high-quality SSR:



  • rexo12
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    rexo12 interpolator
    These are great! I'd like to try my hand at this... are there demo files i can get a hold of to muck around with?
  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    rexo12 said:
    These are great! I'd like to try my hand at this... are there demo files i can get a hold of to muck around with?
    There's plenty of stuff on the UE4 Marketplace :) I started with the ones available for free - Wiktor's sci-fi corridor, the apartment demo, etc, and then I moved on to grabbing some of the $20-30 ones when I had a bit of spare money lying around.

    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.
  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
  • FULGORE
  • Poinball
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    Poinball polycounter lvl 6
    Lighting is what make a Scene pop up and you got it Right man ! :) Love your work
  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    Poinball said:
    Lighting is what make a Scene pop up and you got it Right man ! :) Love your work
    Thanks so much :)
  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    Working on and off on a Re-light of this Modular Research Center environment in UE4 :)

    Before:





    And after (WIP):




  • Jakob Gavelli
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    Jakob Gavelli interpolator
    Duuuude, this is seriously cool!
    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! ^^ 


  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    Duuuude, this is seriously cool!
    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! ^^ 


    Thanks for the support :)

    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 :) Postprocessing-wise I set up a Master unbound volume at the start just to clamp the Exposure values and disable motion blur, then smaller local volumes per room/area - I'll wait until I have a strong idea of what to do with the grading, etc until I touch those - just 'cause I know I have a tendency to fiddle until the shadows are tinted blue :P It's just such an easy go-to.

    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).
  • Jakob Gavelli
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    Jakob Gavelli interpolator
    Oooh! Great answers! =)
    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?


  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    My process for reflection captures is nowhere near as refined ;) 
    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:



  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    A sneak peek at a Lighting-centric thing I'm working on - I'm quickly making very modular parts of a designer fashion "flagship" store, and lighting them fairly close to reality, but a tiny bit exaggerated and within reasonable technical parameters:




  • another caveman
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    another caveman greentooth
    Pretty pleasant to watch a focus on light, well done here!
    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!)
  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    I guess the closest we have to that kind of thing would be either lights with the Min Roughness (in Unreal) tweaked, or on the other end of the spectrum you could use specular-only lights if your engine supports them - I've heard these were used in Uncharted cave areas to make the rocks look still dark but to exaggerate the wet/shiny look :)
  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    For some more insight into my process, I spent my lunch break today making paintovers for my own reference - corrections/adjustments to make to both the lighting and the dressing:


    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
  • FULGORE
  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    Some more lighting studies - another Nonotak-inspired minimalist thing, and a very rough start at imitating light painting/graffiti photography




  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    Re-Lit the American Gas Station on the marketplace:



  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    Using a trick I learned from Scott Warren - simple colour grading steps to get that distinctive David Fincher look and feel:




  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    Whitebox lighting study no. 1 - based it on a real-life building entrance, but I changed up a few things based on feedback and tried to give it a more Fincher-Cronenweth kind of look:



    Breakdown of lighting process:



    Reference:


  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    Lighting a quick blockout of a Cigar Lounge (inspired by Bolivar Cigar Lounge) - trying to balance real-world-accurate classy commercial lighting feel with principles/stylings of lighting for games:

    (ignore low-res bake quality)



    Reference:


  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    Bonus post - found a cinematographer with some really cool work that could make for great reference:

    http://www.ashtailor.co.uk/selected-work/
  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    Getting the post/grading right for the Cigar Lounge - trying to replicate the contrast and warmth of the ref while preserving the blue secondary colour:


  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    First two are done :) 

    ArtStation




  • noisecheck
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    noisecheck polycounter lvl 5
    Great stuff man!
  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    Updated the Facade lighitng based on some critique from reddit :)




  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    Great stuff man!

  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    Another one - night lighting for a modern office with glass partition




  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    Going away from the commercial theme to more industrial (excuse the preview bake as always)

    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


  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    Calling this one done - some lightmap UV issues snuck in there, but they're no big deal

    ArtStation




  • CrackRockSteady
    These look really nice, great colors and composition.  It's cool to see the thought process that goes into them :)
  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    This was a fun and quick one - found some cool ref and wanted to try out a way of lighting a large area in a way that didn't feel too game-y or wasn't clumsy & expensive:

    ArtStation





    Plus now I know the limitations of emissive planes in UE4, I know better when/where to use them
  • RasmusBagner
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    RasmusBagner polycounter lvl 6
    Do you have any feedback when it comes to lightmap uvs, and avoiding light bleeding between floor and walls. ? :)
    The precision of the bake is amazing! 
  • Tetranome
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    Tetranome polycounter lvl 6
    I really like seeing the thought process behind your work. Your colour choices are very cathartic !
  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    Tetranome said:
    I really like seeing the thought process behind your work. Your colour choices are very cathartic !
    Thanks :D glad this stuff can provide some insight
  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    Do you have any feedback when it comes to lightmap uvs, and avoiding light bleeding between floor and walls. ? :)
    The precision of the bake is amazing! 
    RE lightmap UVs, unless it's something complicated or with lightmap-unfriendly shapes, I just let the auto-packer do its thing :) 

    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
  • MattN
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    MattN triangle
    Really like the relight of Wiktor Ohman's scene, very nice atmosphere.

  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    Wrapped up a quick one - inspired by a real History Museum display and the mood/colours in Dishonored:

    ArtStation






  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    Not strictly lighting-only, but I'm using some of the techniques explored above here:

    Thread


  • Genotype
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    Genotype polycounter lvl 5
    Really loving the breakdowns really gives a glance at the thought process behind the lighting! :)

    Do you usually start the scenes with a set plan or is it lots of experimenting?
  • FULGORE
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    FULGORE greentooth
    Genotype said:
    Really loving the breakdowns really gives a glance at the thought process behind the lighting! :)

    Do you usually start the scenes with a set plan or is it lots of experimenting?
    Thanks :) usually I'mm find some ref (or the original scene if it's a re-light) take a Snip and annotate it with some ideas - so far the initial ideas seem to stick and turn out okay. I find it's a good idea to take a break halfway through though, get some fresh eyes on it afterwards, plus I like asking for some peer feedback at that point.

    I've included some of these annotations in a new relight of the Medieval Interior Set on the UE4 marketplace:

    ArtStation






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