Outdoor scene lighting advice
I've been working for some time on a map for the Red Orchestra 2 game (ww2 FPS), this map is my first one and it's based on an outdoor village in the Russian steppe, most of the static meshes beside the grass are the stock one from the game not mine. What I'd like to improve here is the lighting of the map.
This scene takes place during a warm summer day, I've set up the lighting like pictured below but I'm not happy with it. Since I'm not familiar on working with lighting I'd like you guys to give some tips if possible.
Here is the current state of the map, I'll post new screenshots with my changes.
Some things I don't like and want to change:
Also I'm wondering how you guys set your lighting usually, do you work with a reference image or something else?
More images available at http://leogamingstuff.wordpress.com/
This scene takes place during a warm summer day, I've set up the lighting like pictured below but I'm not happy with it. Since I'm not familiar on working with lighting I'd like you guys to give some tips if possible.
Here is the current state of the map, I'll post new screenshots with my changes.
Some things I don't like and want to change:
- The static meshes seem very dark while the terrain is bright
- Not a lot of shadows are visible
- The environment colour and bloom shade might be changed
- The overall feel seem very flat
Also I'm wondering how you guys set your lighting usually, do you work with a reference image or something else?
More images available at http://leogamingstuff.wordpress.com/
Replies
You have your sun acting as your key light which will provide most of the illumination for your scene. Then you have the sky that act's as a huge diffuse light filling in your shaded areas.
With that being said, easiest way to start would be a directional sunlight casting shadows, now depending on what time off day you like to depict, this will influence the colours of the sky, sun and shadows, the harshness of the lighting, the angle and opacity of the shadows and the suns position in the sky.
If you want midday light, then have the sun high in the sky with a desaturated yellow/orange, if you want later in the day move the sun lower down and use a warmer orange/reddish colour.
Depending on how strong your sunlight is will more than likely dictate how dark the shadows will be. Generally the stronger the sunlight, the darker the shadows, especially on a cloudless day.
Try to avoid having the sun at it's highest point has the shadows will be flat as they are cast parallel to the suns position, thus you lose a lot of visual interest in your scene.
For the sky, theres multiple approaches to this. You could use a skylight with a blue colour or a copy of you sun rotated 90 degrees with shadows disabled and a blue colour, or you can use a skydome rig made from multiple spots, this gives you a nice gradation to represent the horizon ans zenith colours.
You could also add more some bounce lights to represent colour bleeding on any strongly saturated objects in your scene, but i guess this is now obsolete with Lightmass.
But basically what Ark said, with a sky like the one in your level, shadows would usually be rather dark because of the smaller diffuse radiation from the sky when compared to overcast sky.
So keep the environmental colour/brightness low in world properties, but not too low so you can still see players in shadows.
At the moment my level is comprised of a single dominant directional light with an orangish bloom tint and the world is using a light blue env colour. All the rest is left by default I think.
In UDK terms, the sky light is replaced by the environment colour set in world properties correct? I don't need to actually place another light for it to act as a filler?
At the moment I think the environment colour is way too bright that would explain the light shadows.
So I'm going to be doing some changes to my light setup and then post back a screenshot for more advice/crits.
I plan to:
ps: Xendance I'd really like to see a few pictures of your work, is that possible or are you guys holding back pics for later?
Betio over here is my work: http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/red-orchestra-heroes-of-stalingrad/1210017p1.html
Bear in mind that those are just old promo shots, it looks a tad different these days
Regarding other questions:
Yes, skylight is considered deprecated, use the environmental colour instead. Just a dominant directional light and the env. colour for outdoor lighting.
On Betio the environmental colour intensity is 0.75 with colour FFC9E0FF (that's the HEX). AO is also on and the distance is 500. You need to tweak the exponent and amount of occlusion applied for indirect/direct lighting yourself. See what look good.
Dominant directional light is 00FFF8E8 with intensity of 1.6. The intensity will probably change when I colour grade the level.
Your map looks gorgeous can't wait to see more RS
The sky in particular is stunning, would you mind telling me where you got this texture? Did you make it yourself?
EDIT: Just remembered that my terrain is in a level and my light + static meshes are in another level could that cause some problems?
Everything in the pics is done by the team, I'm not that much of a modeler really. I don't really even remember who did what
Regarding terrain and sublevels, looking at TWI example, I'd keep terrain, lights and static meshes in the same sublevel. But since the redirect doesn't seem to work with sublevels yet, I'd just put everything into one level.
The only advantage you'd have with an "art" sub level would be that you could use that single art level for all gametypes, effectively cutting memory usage in third comparing to a single level that contains everyhthing (and you'd have three levels, territory, countdown and firefight, hence three times more memory used).
Can't wait to see more pics either way
So I've made some changes to the light setup of my map, I think the light colour is starting to be okay but I'm still unsure if the shadows are dark enough?
Anything else to say?
Id also alter the angle of the sun so you get more interesting shadows cast along the terrain.
Add some fog in there to get some aerial perspective to give a little depth to the scene.
A few more advice would help I think