Lightning advice
Hello there,
I've recently finished doing sci-fi environment for my portfolio, I think something is wrong in this picture though, I'm terrible at lightning so if you give me some advice on how to make this look better, I will be thankful.
I've recently finished doing sci-fi environment for my portfolio, I think something is wrong in this picture though, I'm terrible at lightning so if you give me some advice on how to make this look better, I will be thankful.
Replies
And post a screenshot from your scene without "game mode".
By the way, do you have a lightmass importance volume in your scene ? It's important to compute correctly the bounces of the lighting. Also, try to completely disable the bounce of the lights and progressively reset the value to default (and computing the lighting each time), this way you will be able to see if you need a strong and balanced lighting or something more dark/shadowed.
Try to inspire you from reference, like Halo 4 :
http://www.chrisalbeluhn.com/UDK_Lightmass_Tutorial.html
Snarkiness aside, we have some info here about lighting.
http://wiki.polycount.com/Model%20Presentation
I'm no expert so my explanation might not be 100% correct, but I'll give it a shot:
In your scene, as far as I can tell, the only light sources are the glowing red tanks and the white/blue lights above the doors (with the door lights being a lot less prominent). But, you've lit the whole scene with a really strong white ambient light. Ambient light is supposed to "fake" the amount of light that is bouncing around in all directions in a scene. It determines the light that is hitting parts of the scene that are not illuminated by the main light sources. In an outdoor scene on a sunny day, the ambient light might be pretty bright and will probably be blue, because areas that aren't lit by the sun will still be hit by reflected blue light from the sky.
But in an interior scene like this, there is not a whole lot of light to begin with, so there is not much opportunity for bouncing. So the ambient light will be pretty weak. Check out those Halo 4 screens - the shadows are really dark, basically just black.
Furthermore, in an outdoor daytime scene, the ambient light will be blue because it is coming from the sky (the atmosphere scatters blue light a lot more than other wavelengths, so the reflected light from the atmosphere is blue). But in this scene, any reflected light (whatever small amount there might be) will just be coming off of walls, floors, etc, so it will maintain the same color as the most prominent light sources in the scene. This means you will have pretty uniform colors between your shadows and lit areas.
Just remember that any time something in the scene isn't totally black, that light has to be coming from somewhere. Think about the source of the light to decide what its color and strength should be.
I made a quick crappy paintover to show what I'm saying. I don't know if this is the direction you want to go but I think something like this would be the result if you just had the glowing tanks and door lights illuminating the scene.
Hope this is helpful!
One thing that really helps me with lighting is to gather reference of game lighting and real-world lighting that I like, then try to break them down into which individual light sources they used, plus colors, intensities, and placement. It really helps to have inspirational reference!