Lighting in Engine

 03/12/21 - Week 9

Today, I focused on setting up the lighting for my cart project in unreal engine. This was important so that I can get some better, more accurate and more helpful feedback from my formative hand in which was today.

At first, I was a bit rusty with lighting and I tried to follow some basic tutorials to try to help me to get nice results. I was aiming for a night time scene with a warm glow from the light outside the shop and also the shop window to get a aesthetically pleasing and comforting scene. Trying to follow these resulted in something really not that desirable and it looked not only cold but the fact that it was night wasn't really reading since there was too much bounced light and the scene as a whole was too bright. I really wanted to get the lights in the scene to cast thick and dark shadows on things so emphasise them which was not at all happening here. I also figured out that I had a scaling issue with the scene since all the ui was appearing much larger than usual, this was because although I set my measurements to .m in max I didn't change the actual scale of everything to metres. This meant everything was being scaled down to inches, I fixed this by scaling it up through the export adjustments but this did take me a while to reexport everything and place it back where I wanted it, including all the lighting and rendering boxes.

After looking at this for a while I decided that this lighting was not really helping me at all and was not something that I was happy with. Eventually I found some tutorials that didn't use a skybox and were a bit easier for me to implement by using the premade sky environment in unreal. I think the results of this are much more impressive and give off a better and readable approach in comparison to my first attempt. One thing that I would like to change is that there is supposed to be a streetlamp just off of the diorama causing a warm light to spread across the whole scene, but I am not sure this is reading as well as I would want it to though I am not too sure how particularly I am going to adjust this at the moment.

One thing I really like from how the lighting is looking at the moment is definitely the colours as the purple and yellow tones are creating the look and feel that I wanted - I adjusted the colours manually using the post processing volume which was a very useful way to get precisely what I needed without messing with the lighting that was already there.

Overall, this week has been a productive one and I'm hoping that this will be enough for the moment to get some good feedback for. I will be moving on to texturing once I have finished my character and I am excited to see this scene look more like a finished product very soon.