Library WIP in UE4 - Looking for Critique (Especially on Lighting)
Hello!
This is my first time actually posting to Polycount. I've been working on this library scene for a little while, and I've found lighting this to be a lot more involved than I anticipated, so I would love feedback on if I'm approaching this correctly.
At first I ran into a lot of issues where small lights (even 1 candela) would completely blow out any wall near it, so I fiddled with the camera exposure and GI until it looked better, and came to the conclusion that it would look better to add a bunch of static lights to get rid of big dark patches without using an overpowering amount of GI.
I've tried to place candelabras in some of the places where I need light, but I don't know if I have a good balance between diegetic light coming from candles and invisible floating lights. The shininess of the floor and walls makes it hard to hide light sources so for some of the general lights I've turned down their specular intensity to better hide them.
Looking now at all of the lights in the scene I can't help but wonder 'am I doing this right?' I'd love feedback on anything here, but critique on the lighting would be especially helpful!
Beyond that, I think the room's layout is mostly done, and I mainly just want to fill it with some more tables and clutter.
Replies
Hey, cool project! Looks like you have an interesting lighting situation.
Seeing the large windows, I would expect a dim, blueish ambient light from the nightsky and moon.
When I have to light interiors with baked lighting:
Starting with the main lightsources. In this case I would use a directional for moonlight. Also auto exposure off, lightmass importance volume, find good lightmass settings).
Test-bake a few times to get the right amount of bounce light from main light. Possibly adjust the indirect lighting value of main light moderately and/or increase GI intensity in post processing.
Super dark areas can also be fake lit up using ambient cubemap with very low intensity (no shadow or reflection occlusion - so careful!).
When I don't get around placing fill-lights, increasing the lights' radius and soft radius makes it show up less harsh in reflections.
Fog will help with depth perception.
Lights can be faded out on distance for performance (and makes scene sometimes more readable imho)
Bit distracting ground shadows from chandeliers, maybe disable shadow casting for mesh and fake ground shadows?
That's at least how I remember it :P
In the end, each situation is slightly different.
Curious how other people would approach lighting this.
Thanks for the advice! I like the idea of using the moonlight as a starting point and building up from there. I'm excited to do another pass on this and post an update soon.
After fiddling around with the moonlight coming in from the windows for a while, I eventually decided I wanted the windows to play a bigger part in the scene overall, and decided to change it into a daytime scene. I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out!
Cool, like the adjustments 👍️