UE4 - Apartment Environment [Lighting Study]

Shyralon

Hey Guys!
Learned a lot about lighting the last weeks and did quite a few experiments - this particular one here I really liked, so I decided I will turn it into a full environment. Currently I am fairly satisfied with the lighting and started modeling all the assets I will need to populate the scene.
The brick texture is only a placeholder I got somewhere from the internet without any normal/displacement information, will replace these later.
If you have any feedback, please let me know
[I really hope this is not another project I will never finish]

RustySpannerz

Images seem a little contrasty but other than that, great start! Your whiskey bottle looks incredible! In fact your materials in general look really good! 

FULGORE

Are you using any references/inspiration for the lighting? mostly asking because it seems to be a nice range of brightness where it's hitting stuff directly, but the indirect light seems weak if you look at the fabrics - might also be too dark albedo textures maybe?

Small scale assets looks nice so far happy to see some detail close-up and not just "eh, that will do"

For some technical reference for natural light in an interior, this might help out a bit - https://80.lv/articles/interior-lighting-night-day/

CupMcCakers

It looks to me like some of the albedo textures are too dark as was mentioend by Fulgore. How many lights do you have in the scene at the moment?

Shyralon

@RustySpannerz
Thanks! Currently I have pretty much no postprocessing/colorgrading applied, I plan to do that once the main assets are finished
@FULGORE
Yeah, I totally agree with you on the dark spots - been working on this for a while but I still have not figured out why there seem to be some spots which are not hit by the indirect lighting at all.
Checked my albedos again, they are all in the PBR range so they should not be a problem, right now I think I have parts of the exposure settings messed up
Also, that link is super helpfull, thanks for that
@CupMcCakers
Textures should be okay, I checked their brightness again. Currently I am only using a directional light along with 3 light portals and a skylight since I finally want to learn how to actually use baked indirect lighting.

skyline5gtr

scene needs more overall GI to help it along

bigodon

I'm in love with your jack daniels bootle, do you mind to share some information on this material? i think this is the best looking glass with liquid i saw in ue4.

Shyralon

@skyline5gtr
Working on it, just want to finish the basic materials first
@bigodon
Thanks, glad you like it
Those are actually two materials, one for the liquid and one for the glass (they are basically the same just with a different Index of Refraction value, 1.356 for the liquid and 1.5 for the glass - values are taken from this list here: http://www.pixelandpoly.com/ior.html)



However, the most important thing for this material are the screen space reflections which needs to be activated.
I also tweaked the SSR quality value in the scalability.ini to have a higher quality.

The mesh of the bottle has actual thickness and the liquid as a seperate mesh inside.

skyline5gtr

Ah my bad, sorry to jump the gun 

bigodon

Shyralon said:

@skyline5gtr
Working on it, just want to finish the basic materials first
@bigodon
Thanks, glad you like it
Those are actually two materials, one for the liquid and one for the glass (they are basically the same just with a different Index of Refraction value, 1.356 for the liquid and 1.5 for the glass - values are taken from this list here: http://www.pixelandpoly.com/ior.html)



However, the most important thing for this material are the screen space reflections which needs to be activated.
I also tweaked the SSR quality value in the scalability.ini to have a higher quality.

The mesh of the bottle has actual thickness and the liquid as a seperate mesh inside.

Very nice! thanks for the tips
something i haven't made is tweak the scalability ini values for crank up the SSR, i will check this out today and how much gain i can have

Shyralon

Some smaller updates.
Most likely will have to pause this project for a while as I got another project for university coming up but I still plan to eventually finish this.