Indian Courtyard - UE5

srinivasjlkm

Been seeing so many courtyard Portfolio pieces with moroccon or arabic theme so I decided to make an indoor courtyard found inside many old indian houses. Found a reference online and wanted to add some of my own elements into the scene and try getting a good output from Unreal Engine. Been a long time since a touched UE so i hope this project refreshes me.

Starting with the reference and blockout

srinivasjlkm

Getting textures for the floor, wall and bricks from Megascans library, and for the remaining assets like doors, ceiling, windows, props I worked on them in either Substance Designer or Painter. Made a simple pillow and cloth in Marvelous deisgner .I think I would be spending more time playing around inside the engine and would probably need advice on lighting. 

ZacD

On the door texture I like the overall feel of it, but there's a few things that are a tiny bit off.
There's an overlayed pattern across all of the wood that it makes it look more like one carved piece of wood instead of separate planks.  
The middle split between the 2 halves is getting a little lost, it's more subtle than the other planks edges.

srinivasjlkm

Thanks for that fixed it a bit in texture painting itself. whereas for the planks - I intended to make it like grooves instead of separate planks. i deepend the grooves a little though. And i notices some grooves overlapping at the bottom of the door so i fixed that too. 

srinivasjlkm

Next part , imported everything into UE5. Here I need help and advice to get the best lighting for this scene and render. Plan to make a few good images and short cinematic with just manual focus into the scene or objects since its a small scene .

plaintextures

Your textures on door are too soft/blurry.

srinivasjlkm

If you mean soft and blurry in the screenshot above  from UE5, its because its a low-res screenshot after only importing everything into UE with materials still yet to updated and not a render yet. 
And after adjusting the lighting, render, camera settings should be getting a better result and more sharper image overall hopefully.
Still tweaking in UE and trying to focus on overall look and feel of the scene inside UE.

Any advice on lighting for this scene ? i have to start on that part.
If i still have texture issues based on my camera setup ,i can fix it later too.

srinivasjlkm

I would appreciate if anyone can help with advice and suggestions to make this scene better.

Th scene is mostly lit with skylight , directional light, hdri and tweaks in the post process volume. I have gotten pretty close to my reference image but i feel something can be worked on to make it better- just cant point out what exactly . And I am also working on a night time lighting for the same scene.
Testing out the different render outcomes - most probably will stick to Path tracing as its only for practice and a portfolio piece.
rendered out with path tracing - i like the slight reflections from the front door and the shine of the brick walls on the right
rendered with lumen - overall i feel this is fine but misses the slight reflection from the door and bricks and compared to path tracing render the sense of depth achieved with the abient lighting and shadows are much less prominent that the path tracing render above.

srinivasjlkm

Almost done with the night lighting , open to sugestions and advice. For the night scene i added volumetric fog to be very subtle and barely visible. night skylight with a slight blue tint and some indoor lighting, while darkening the exterior hdri light


The key difference between the day scene and night scene is the direction of light.
in the night scene- indoor lights coming from the sides and bouncing inward
in the day scene - main light coming through the center and bouncing outward
Just wanted to make a contrast in lighting direction

Eric Chadwick

This scene looks great! The night time version could use some lighting love though, it's really underlit and underexposed. It might help to look to some professional lighting for inspiration, for example 

https://litawards.com/winners/winner.php?id=2981&mode=win


https://www.agoda.com/en-ca/the-temple-house/hotel/chengdu-cn.html?cid=1844104&ds=FNs5gfqCvpx1Q4L9

srinivasjlkm

Thanks you for these night lighting references. Trying to integrate some soft lighting in the scene . adding some specular to wood and the way the lights fade with distance. slightly increased the exposure
and increased the intensity of lights, added a small light under the doors on the side.

Eric Chadwick

Looking much brighter, nice.

However for me it's lacking in composition, my eyes don't know quite where to go, and I land on the upper part of the doors where it's lit pretty flat and not very interestingly. 

I think it would help to study composition, how to lead the viewer's eyes around your piece, and thus get them excited by your work. There's a lot to learn about composition, but it's been used and studied for hundreds of years, the old masters were really good at this. Lots of good resources now to learn from:
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Concept_Fundamentals#Composition

srinivasjlkm

I agree on this as I was putting the lighting up, i myself could not figure out where to focus - as the lights came from 3 sides to brighten the images moving center.
And then if I only lit up 1 side it does show focus point towards 1 half side of the image until the plant in the middle but the remainder of the scene though it has slight bouncing light, overall loses interest. I do like a certain perspective of this and the shadows of the swing and pillar falling on the door though.

So instead ,I was thinking of adding an element like a hanging bulb or some sort of light to push the focus into or towards the center of the image just light the daylight scene does and focus towards the cente of the image.
My initial intention was to retain the blue night skylight pushing towards the center which would not be too bright to attract attention or focus but more for the ambience of the timing.
any suggestions or ideas?

srinivasjlkm

Spent lots of time experimenting with several variations of lights setup but it just kept getting more distracting and finlly simplified it and landed on this and am liking where this is going. I realized that I already had and incense stick holder next to the plant and just added a stick and lit it up. added some ghost lights to expose the dark corners of the scene and now my focus falls towards the center or closer to the plant like I intially intended and increased overall scene exposure. Im still thinking if i should reduce the light intensity from the right sidean if I should reduce the blueish night lighting in the center ...

Any thoughts or suggestions on this

srinivasjlkm

Finally done with this project and thanks for all the advice along the way. will be posting on my artstation soon.