Week 8: Lighting

Module: GAR106 environment art 2

Brief: “Model, texture and present in UE5 a Victorian three-storey terraced building with a shop on the ground floor facing the street.”

House: Gryffindor

Plot number: 16 (corner)

Week eight: Mon 13th March to Sun 19th March 2023

Lighting functions as a way to add drama, depth and atmosphere to the environment, thereby enhancing the story being told. In 3D scenes, the most important parts of lighting to control are natural and artificial light sources, intensity, and temperature. Through various combinations of these elements, artists can direct the audience’s eyes to important areas/features, support the overall genre and mood of the game, and reflect the underlying psychology of the characters and scene, all of which help to draw the players into the world.

For my shop, I knew that I wanted the scene to be dark, closer to nighttime, and that I wanted to keep the light sources in theme with the stained-glass accents in the windows and lamps. This provided me with my overall colour palette (blue, green, and yellow with a cooler tint) and a guide for the types of lighting I was going to utilize the most (practical lighting, which is the use of normal working light sources in a scene such as lamps).

To start with, I used a tutorial on CGHero* to figure out how to set up the scene, such as placing the directional light that functions as the sun, the volumetric clouds, and the sky atmosphere. I started with this because going into the lighting stage I realized that I didn’t understand how the Unreal environments worked, so I decided that it would be best to start at the beginning and then build my scene from that.

I loosely followed another tutorial on Youtube** about lighting a nighttime scene in Unreal but ultimately experimented with the lighting myself to produce a low intensity, pale blue-sky light that, couple with the low-lying sun and purple tinted clouds, made the scene feel like a nighttime scene without plunging the whole area into near darkness.

I then utilized a combination of point lights and spotlights to create the lamps and light coming out of the windows, changing them to shades of green or yellow to match the stained glass and balance out the light distribution somewhat across the shop. I wanted to keep the temperature cooler as I felt that it worked better with a night themed scene and added a sense of intrigue and curiosity, which I feel is associated with antique stores and the question of “what could be inside?” when you look at them.

REFERENCES

* Mcdowell, Kirsten. 2022. ‘Skies and Clouds in Unreal Engine 5.’ CGHero [online]. Available at: https://cghero.com/tutorials/skies-clouds-unreal-engine-5 [accessed 9 May 2023].

** Faucher, William. 2022. Lighting a NIGHT-TIME exterior in Unreal [YouTube user-generated content]. Available at: Lighting a NIGHT-TIME exterior in Unreal - YouTube [accessed 9 May 2023].