Advice on Lighting

Dee

Hello people,

We are doing a trailer in UDK, but having lots of problems with lighting it, I wanted to ask for any piece of advice on how to make this piece better, keep in mind its still a work in progress.

Im really looking for solutions on making the character pop from the screen and overall lighting advice on the environment.

Any constructive feedback is really welcomed...

https://vimeo.com/65128636

Hourences

You need to use the lightchannels to have a separate set of lights illuminate the char than the ones that light up the level, that way you get full control of placement and brightness without altering the level.

You may want to go without light environment on the character (will make dyn shadows harder/impossible though), or turn off boolean light env on the light env if you keep it to possibly improve the quality a bit. There are also additional settings in world properties - light environment. Requires that char box to be ticked on the mesh.

Improved character material could also help. Rim lighting/fake sub surface scattering/cubemaps or such. The skin should be noticeably different shading wise than his clothing or metal, so you create an interesting composition of different materials. It currently blends together.

Dee

Thanks Hourences,

Interesting idea about skipping the light environment completely, gonna try that next. Having control of lights in every frame seems like a better solution then try to capture good lighting just from the environment.

I think I came to this result by random on/off poking in the properties of every actor. I will probably have ago at lighting this environment again from scratch. Boolean light tuned off is already there and definitely makes lighting better.

Going to invest some time into building the shaders as you mentioned. Danke.