UDK Lighting for a 'Film noir' Style scene

00peteee00

I am currently attempting a project creating a lighting solution in UDK using a 'Film Noir' Style. Was wondering whether any body had any experience with this style of lighting or could direct me to helpful tutorials, thanks all :thumbup:

Ark

Well nearly all Film Noir movies are black and white, have very high contrast and shadows are very importantly integrated for visual interest.

Just because your going for the Noir look though, doesn't mean you have to go black and white. Using desaturated colours and complimentary harmony can be worth investigating, this way you get the Noir look with colour and very good contrast.

Just making a scene look dark will not work if theres not enough contrast in your image, light/dark tones will play a more important role than colour.

If you do just want black and white, trying to use reflections and shadows to add interest to the scene.
If you look at many movies of this style, they spray water on the streets to get reflections and brighten up the scene from the reflected light, not to mention the interest this adds to the scene.

Shadows also play a big roll, they use alot of cookie cutters/gobos on lights to break up the light/shadows casts onto there subjects, this adds alot of graphic weight to the scene.



Also things like fog or steam are good for getting depth into a scene and silhouetting characters and such to stand out.

One of my favorite films is Dark City which isn't really Noir per-say, but as you might tell from the name or you might have already seen it, it takes place in a city with no sunlight, yet the scenes are lit really well, with good strong low-key lighting.

odd_enough

Interesting. I just converted one of my environments to Film Noir style last month. I initially tried to use a color lookup table (search the UDN for LUT), but that doesn't work very well if you are looking to isolate certain colors like in some movies (often red objects).

What I ended up doing was running each texture through a medium-contrast desaturation action in Photoshop and specifically colored in the objects I wanted in red. It takes time, yeah, but I really saw no other way of doing that cleanly. Also added a tight bloom to the lights and a subtle film grain.