Creating Realistic Lighting for Environments in Unreal Engine 5

1. Introduction Trailer: Hi and welcome to this extensive look at Lighting inside of Unreal Engine five. My name is Tilman Milder, and I'm currently a lighting and art director with EA. And I have worked on titles such as the Star Wars Battlefront series, Battlefield, Ellen Wake two, as well as the just recently announced Dune game by Fancom. Even though Unreal four is still an exceptional engine, in this course, we will focus on working with Unreal five to see how far we can push Lumen and other great new features. For this course, we have some amazing content sponsors like Real Biomes and Decogon who have shared their assets with us to use in this course. Next to this, we have also used various marketplace assets and mega scans. Unfortunately, there will be no source files included in this course, as we do not own the rights to these assets. However, we have created a list in a description linking to the assets that we used in this course. But not to worry. The techniques we teach in this course can be applied to any asset or environment. So what can you expect from this course? First off, we will be looking at some fundamentals of lighting, camera, and exposure theory and generally just working with different sets of values and show how to effectively utilize different types of lights and why. Next, we will be looking at how to create state of the art portfolio renders of pretty much any type of asset you can imagine. We will make sure you have solid skills in presenting your artwork and a competitive and great looking portfolio of exceptional quality. This section will cover props, nature assets, different vehicles, as well as a character presentation in both more traditional and more photographic ways. Last but not least, we will work with a large and open environment that has interior spaces as well and we learn how the sun and sky can work together greatly and how we can use exposure to make transitioning through different parts of the scene as smooth as possible. Adding onto that, we will build a few different setups to learn how easy it is to get different lighting conditions to work once we have established a solid base. With over 15 hours of video content, I feel confident that at the end of this course, you have a very strong foundation and understanding of lighting in general and how to create amazing lighting setups. So that's about it, and I hope you will have as much fun learning from this course as I had making it. 2. Overview: Hey, everyone. Before we get the tutorial course started, I just wanted to mention to you where I got the assets for the environment. These assets will not be included in the source files due to copyright, but you can find all of them on the Unreal marketplace. Let's get started with a desert environment. Real Biomes was kind enough to sponsor this environment. You can find it by searching for real Biomes, desert cliffs on the Unreal marketplace. Next to this, we also want to thank Decogon for sponsoring their diner environment. You can find this one by searching for Reno's diner. Finally, we use two more asset packs. The exterior for the diner is from the Pack Rosie's diner, and the gas station is the desert gas station by Joachim Stikon. And that's pretty much it. Of course we're using UnwilEngine five, so you can use the built in Quixolmega scans if you want to get any assets for free. And also, you can find a lot of free assets in entire environments, even on the Unreal marketplace if you're on a budget. So now let's get started with the course. Hello, everybody. Welcome. And thank you for watching Fast Track Tutorials. My name is Tilman Milder. Some might know me as Dereos 51 from the Lighting Academy, and I will be your instructor for this little lighting journey. If you're interested, what I've done over the past years, feel free to check out my art station. Right now, I'm a lighting and art director at Electronic Arts. I'm more in, like, a global tech position right now, working on internal projects. And I worked at Dice before doing Star Wars, battlefield. I live in Finland now since I worked for a year about for remedy working on Alan Week two and some other things. And I've been quite around a bit in the industry so far. Like, I started around 2010 by doing a school for video game art, and I got a first job at a studio in Berlin as an environment art intern, then started developing different skill sets there, going into tech art, doing a lot of vegetation related stuff and terrain stuff and sky stuff. And ultimately, really, like, my biggest passion is making beautiful pixels and also making the way to get there smooth and easy, which is why I like to work a lot with the tech teams. So for me, lighting art was kind of always like the thing I wanted to go towards too. And I like it always sounds a bit pretentious, but what we're going to do in these lessons or in this course is we're going to, like, tackle lighting from quite a holistic perspective. That's how I like to think about it. I won't talk too much about it now, but it will become more clear, and I will mention it throughout the course itself. And to give you guys a quick overview, the first thing are we going to do is we're going to just do a very simple you can already see it here. Super simple scene, which is going to go through some real basics of how lighting actually works in games and the different components that we can use to create lighting. Also, I will draw some very, very bad looking things in paint because it helps me to illustrate some of the concepts. So please get mentally ready for bad drawing skills. We will be doing this in Unreal five. I thought a lot about this before because, like, Unreal four is actually still more stable in many ways, and the techniques there are like battle proven. But then again, yeah, Lumen is very, very, very exciting, and it works really good already. There are still a few issues here and there, and we may actually run into a few of these. So please just bear that in mind that like some things they can be a bit wonky or broken, and that is just the nature of Unreal itself being very new like UnreelFive at that. There's a lot of stuff that is really polished already that also came kind of like straight over from Unreel four. But I think it's exciting to look at all these things in a new framework like UnreelFV and also obviously take advantage of all the new bells and whistles that the technology comes with. So yeah, in the next lesson, we'll do like this first introduction to all the different tool sets that we can use and also how lighting actually works. Then we will in the future lessons, we'll do some prop lighting. I guess, it's quite interesting for people as well that just want to, you know, up their skills of, like, how to actually present their work. I think it is very, very important. We will also and I will talk about this a lot. We will try to teach our brain and our eyes. We will learn how to see things because especially in portfolio work as well, it's really important that you can be very self reflective and that you can really see where problems are in your own work, and that you can also look at real reference, for example, and you can just understand why something looks the way it does, which is ultimately incredibly valuable tool for us to replicate things. So very important for portfolio work. So we're going to do some prop lighting. We're going to look into some character lighting and really important also here to understand with these topics is that a lot of these things, you know, this is my way of doing it. It is not the ultimate best way. It's not the only way everybody has their own way of doing things. This is just like how I like to work and approach my work. And also, like, for example, with the character light setup, you know, you can go so many different ways that are also very dependent on the content that you use. You can have, like, a very poppy presentation. If you have stylized characters, you can do, like, some really cool, like, you know, like blizzard character stuff where, you know, the character is presented in different poses with weapons and, like, cool backgrounds or you can choose a more muted approach, be more like a photography approach or like a portrait picture approach, even. So there's many, many different ways of doing this, and this is by no means the way to rule them all. But I think what will be really important for everybody that is watching these courses is that it's about the techniques a lot. It's about how we approach things, and that can be mapped to anything that you want in the end, actually. So, you know, just take it as this. And when we've gone through that, we will finally tackle a really big environment where we have outdoor area, large outdoor open world ish kind of thing. We do have some interior. We do have some characters in there, because, like, for me, it was really important to not, like, teach you like, This is how I like an interior. This is how I like an exterior, because I know that there's, like, a huge difference between doing portfolio work and doing actual video games. But I think what people quite often struggle the most with is the connection of bringing things together. So this again, feeds into the holistic kind of approach that I really like. Is like I don't really like to build things too much in isolation, because at the end of the day, we're not necessarily just making beauty shots for rtstation. We're probably going to end up in a video game studio working on an actual product. And you will see that a lot of the approaches that I have come from production experience. And I am absolutely not against doing certain things that are basically only vital for, like, portfolio purposes, but you will just, like, recognize in how I approach things that it is a bit more of like this production driven approach where I'm kind of I'm seeing the bigger picture. I'm not just looking at, like, you know, the perfect little corner because I kind of want all them corners to be perfect. And I'll show you smart ways where we can also achieve very high quality across a very big set of content without having to feel like we're dying because there's too much like little polish or small things or stuff like that. So yeah, with that out of the way, that will be the sort of, like, way we will handle this course. And well, I guess we should start with the first little real thing. So thank you so much for watching this and see you in the next lesson. Cheers. 3. Fundamentals Part1: All right. Here we are now with the first lesson, where we're going to have a look at the absolute basics. But please really take this in because I know it always sounds so boring, but these fundamentals will elevate your work because it is really about understanding a lot of these core concepts to a high level, right? So you can actually really understand what's going on. So even if it may seem boring at first, give this stuff a shot. It's good information. But before we jump into anything, there is a bunch of things that we need to set. Usually when you start Unreal five, it should automatically already run in direct X 12 mode, and lumen should be the default lighting solution. So we can just go into the project settings under the rendering tab and we can just make sure that everything is there in a correct way. So we can see here our dynamic global illumination method is set to lumen, perfect, reflection set to lumen perfect. I don't have hardware ray tracing turned on for Lumen because it was completely busting my performance hardcore in the outdoor levels. So we'll see how we go with that. I do keep the software ray tracing in detail tracing. So what that means is, and I'll show these things also later on is that Lumen uses simplified objects to trace the lighting calculation against. They're called distance field measures, basically. Every object has a representation of that simplified thing and that one then basically logs down into a world representation. The world representation is a lot more loss than the object representation. And when you switch this to global tracing, it will basically use the lows version, and when you have that on detail tracing, it will do way more accurate calculations, so to speak. And for now, we're going to leave it at this. So it may actually be that per default, the shadow map is the shadow map. But what we're going to do is we're going to use the virtual shadow maps, and I will explain what all that stuff is. So no worries here. I do have support hardware tracing turned on, and that means that I can decide per object or light source if I actually want to use any ate tracing features. And this will come in handy at some point, which is why I have it turned on. And these ones here, they're all turned off because those are the settings that I kind of want to tweak if I want them to. I don't want this to just generally be there. All right? So one important thing when we go down here, we have some default settings for our host process volume. And here this value, the auto exposure bias. We're going to set this to zero. And that is all going to make a lot more sense later on, but trust me on this. We set it to zero, and then so here's the thing. Unreal uses a sort of like a camera exposure system. And one important thing to understand about lighting is that potential basically saying everything is kind of relative so the values of the lights that we use inside our viewport, they are relative based on what the camera exposure is. So we can basically have a light that has an intensity of five and we can make it look a certain way, and then we can have a light that has the intensity of 5,000, and we can make it look exactly the same as the light that has the intensity of five, not next to each other, but like exclusively basically, because all these values are relative to one another. So per default unreal basically uses, arbitrary values, right? And you may have seen a lot of videos where, like, someone sets the exposure to, like, one and one and locks it in and then just does the lighting like that. And that is one way of doing it. However, I'm a very huge fan of using something that is called physical values. And physical values means that we can actually feed in values to our light sources that are based on what we can measure in the real world. So, if I'm just going to move this away here and I'm going to go to my light menu and I'm going to feed in a directional light, and this one is kind of like the sun. So now we can see that we clearly see something, right? But this light has an intensity of ten lacks. Ten lacks is pretty much like nighttime lighting. On a very sunny day, the sun actually has an intensity 85100-20 thousand lacks. So the problem is that per default, the exposure system and unreal does not really work well with these values. So what we need to do is here in the search tab, we type um nins and I've already checked this, so you find this thing here, it's called extend default luminance range in auto exposure settings. And again, I will explain this further down the line, but, like, you know, just hit this box, and then we're actually good to go. Cool. So as you can see, we have our little scene here, and it is absolutely completely dark. We can go to unlit and then we see that we actually have something here. So let's give this a first look here. So, first off, we have a point light. And as you can see, it is a light that emits into all different directions. And we obviously do have some shadow casting here. And actually, let me quickly bring up the options again because we'll need them so I can show you something down the line. So point lights are something that is quite often used. However, one thing that everybody has to understand, and that is, again, this comes from a production point of view. If you have a shadow on your point light, it's actually going to be very, very expensive. Because the shadow that is being cast is a texture, and it needs textures all around the light. So if I have a point light here and we're going to add, whoops, we're going to add a spotlight here. So you can see that the spotlight clearly has, like, a direction that it points towards. Point lights are also sometimes called omnidirectional lights in other tools. So you can see here now, this is very focused. So like, we have our shadow here from the spotlight, and the shadow is just like cast in this direction. So, however, now, please, yeah, forgive me for my drawing skills. So the reason why point lights with shadows are actually so expensive is because what happens is a point light shadow gets calculated as if there is a cube around the point light. So we have our beautiful cube here. And the point light is kind of like inside here. And now imagine that on each side of the cube, we have a spotlight. So one spotlight faces in this direction, one spotlight faces in the front direction, one spotlight goes down, one goes over here. And so basically we have six spotlights that go in all these directions, and that is how the shadows for a point light are actually being calculated. So point light shadows are as expensive as having six spotlights that also cast a shadow. Now this is very important to understand because in most games or other, like, work, you will actually see point lights being used without the shadows. So you have to be very smart how you use them. And quite often, what is being done is that point lights are being faked by, like, you know, let's say you have a wall lamp and you want this wall lamp to cast shadows. So what quite often happens is that people basically take a point light, rotate it downwards, then they take the point light again, and I'm duplicating this by holding Alt and dragging it so I get a second one. And then they just point that one upwards and then they put them kind of like together. And when you have these both lights selected, you know, they choose like a rather big angle kind of like this. And that is quite often how you see point light sort of behavior being faked because it is still a lot cheaper. But in any case, so we have point lights that we can use. We have spotlights that we can use. I will refer to these type of lights as also local lights because these are lights that we place in the environment, right, that we use, like, you know, as a lamp fixture or stuff like that. So these are local lights. We also have another type of light, which is the rectangular light. And this one is very interesting because when you look at the point light, and if you see me just like putting it down here and actually, let's open up this material, and I just have it here, and we convert this into a perimeter. This is my roughness, because right now we don't really see the reflection of this. So if I save this and I'll adjust the roughness of screen, you will see that we start getting a reflection here. So the thing is in reality, there are no point lights really because there is no infinitely small light source that just emits light. So in reality, these lights, they always come from a certain shape. And we do use point lights a lot for, let's say, for example, a light bulb or something like that, right? But even a light bulb actually has a physical size. So the thing is evaluating lighting from a point is very efficient and very fast, and it also is more efficient for shadow casting. But as soon as we ping this guy in, this is actually an area light, which is something very common, like, for example, if you have a neon sign or your TV, that is where light is emitted from an area. So you can see that when we increase this area, the same way our reflection increases, right? So now let's have a look at something if I doesn't like that. So I'm just going to turn these off. So usually, when the bigger a light source gets, the more soft the shadows get. So you can sort of see something like this here, but you can also see that it's like glitching out a bit. And the reason for that is that soft shadows are, again, very expensive. And in Unreal four, we don't have the virtual shadow map. We have only the shadow map. And as you can see, that this is the shadow that we usually get. So no matter how big that light source actually is, you can see that the shadow always stays sharp. And that is not very realistic. So what Unreal five now has is this beautiful thing called virtual shadow map. And a virtual shadow map, it can sort of simulate that effect of the softening from, like, a bigger light source. So it kind of, like, can do that, but it has limits, so you can see that it feels glitchy here. This effect is what we actually call and refer to as Penumbra. So that is the penumbra of the shadow. And it just, like, makes stuff look more realistic. But again, it has limits, so you can see when I decrease the size of the light source, it actually becomes more accurate. And this whole thing is where tracing actually starts to become a good thing. So if I go into these settings here, cast ray traced shadows and I set this to enabled, now you can see that we get fully traced soft shadows. Now if I take this light, and I just make this like super big. You know, this is like a super big softbox lighting now. Like, look at this. So this is like this is super accurate now how this shadow looks, but we cannot really do this with techniques that are based on texture maps for the shadows, which the virtual shadow map still is. But it does come in very, very handy to use the Virtual shadow map as long as we don't go too nuts with the size of lights, and the virtual shadow map is actually really good for outdoor lighting as well. So another interesting thing with these, like, local lights is is that we can actually tell these two lights here also to be sort of like an area light. So if I turn this one off and I go back in here and I do affect world, I'm going to turn on the shadows for now just because we can see it better that way. So the cool thing is that we have here, we have a source radius, let's ignore the soft source radius for now because that one is basically something to fake certain things. And we have a source length. So the source radius basically just turns this point light, and let's have a look at the reflection too. It basically turns the point light into like a ball. So it's like a glowy ball now. And you can see how the shadows actually soften the bigger the light source gets, which is, again, very, very accurate. So if we would like to do a neon tube light, what we would have to do is we would have to give this ball some size. And let's make a super big tube. And if we then basically crank the source length, I don't know why per default is rotated like that. It just kind seems like a little bit like, I don't know, I think you would want it like this. So you can see now that if I give this, like, a thickness of maybe five and just crank this. So now we have a really nice neon tube light. And the same thing can be done for this one. And the good thing is we also have a source length here because remember, when I said that point lights are really expensive, especially when they cast shadows. So if you want to have a ceiling lamp where you have where you have a ceiling light tube light, we can actually take this one and it can have shadows. And then we can just really Oh, I was tweaking the soft source radius. Good me. Sometimes these settings are a bit confusing. So we can do this, and then we can do this. So now we can basically get our neon tube light, but we only cast shadows downwards, which makes this like we get the nice specula that looks proper. We get a good distribution for the lighting, and we still get rather efficient shadows. So these are the basic light types that we can use. And one important thing to know is up here, we have this mobility thing, and we can do static, stationary and movable. So since we're going to be using lumen for all of the stuff that we're going to do now, only movable works, actually. I mean, the light still kind of works when it's not movable, but when we do shadow casting, we potentially get some text in the shadows that says preview. So the thing is this, Movable lights are fully dynamic, and lumen is a fully dynamic lighting solution. So it makes sense to use the lights as movable. Stationary estatic is used when you want to bake your lighting, which is then basically a static lighting that cannot change at runtime. And if I would bake this lighting now and I would move the cube, the shadow of the cube would just stay there because it's baked into a texture that is on the object. And we're not really concerned with these two light types. And again, it's a little bit interesting that when you drag the lights in per default, they're always on stationary. But it's really important that you make sure that you just switch them all to movable because that is just what we're going to be using. So before we look at the other light types, one of the key concepts about lighting that is very important to understand is actually the difference between direct lighting and indirect lighting. And for this, I am going to use my advanced drawing skills again. So when we have a ground thing here, for example. And we do have a little ball here, very beautiful ball. So what we refer to as direct lighting in a video game engine is basically, let's say, I have my light source here. It's a spotlight, okay? So it's kind of like pointed like this. So the direct lighting is what we mean by the ray of light. That is the first ray of light that is shot, and there's many of these, right, because there's going to be a lot of these rays. But every ray that is the one that comes from the light source and then hits the surface, that is the first ray of light, and that one is the direct light. And this one is the cheapest to compute. So that one is actually the reason that if I'm going to do let's get some things going in here so I can illustrate this better. I'm going to take a post process volume here just now. And down here where we have the global illumination method, I'm just going to set none for now. And what I'm also going to do is, I'm going to go to my content browser, and in the settings, you can say, show engine content, and then you get this folder here. And then when you just type in sphere, we can get the editor sphere here. So let's just take this guy, and then we're going to get the material from the cube, and we're just going to throw it onto the sphere as well. So now let's illustrate this quickly because I think it just makes it a lot easier to understand. So I'm just going to revert all this. I'm going to put my light here. I'm going to do it like this. Also, I will bump the roughness back up to one. It's a bit easier to see. So when I hit this, you can see that there is basically no, like, lighting, basically, everything that is hit by the first ray receives lighting, but everything else is page black, so to speak. And that is because we don't actually have indirect lighting, and indirect lighting is what happens when light bounces off the surface. It's basically the secondary ray that bounces off from the surface and hits this surface and then bounces back to the surface again, and it just basically creates all these bounces into many different directions, right? That is what gives indirect color to objects. Let's say, for example, if this floor would be red once the light hits the floor, then the bound lighting or the indirect lighting would become red, and it would put red onto the sphere. So this is what we call indirect lighting, and it is one of the most expensive things to calculate. And thank God we have Unreal five now because here we actually have lumen, and it actually didn't really switch anything, which is absolutely fantastic because I was trying to prove a point, and I was already seeing that there's some values here. So, we can actually see that there already is bound sliding, but it would basically be completely pitch black. I thought we could do that. Well, it is what it is. It doesn't really switch. So, if I would go in now and take this material that I have here, and let's say we just, like, duplicate it and call it, red, and we go in here, we delete this guy, right click or let's just we hold the three and click this so we get a color. And then we right click it and we say convert to parameter and we just call it color. And the reason why I'm making a parameter is so I don't have to, like, recompile the shader all the time, but I can just tweak the color and it just automatically updates. So I'm going to browse this material. Too many windows. And I'll just direct this onto the floor. And now, what I'm going to do is it's going to be off screen, so sorry for that. I'm just going to make this like super red. And now you can see how the lighting actually bounces off to the sphere. So that is the indirect lighting. And luckily we have now technique called lumen, which basically calculates this indirect lighting for us, which is very, very nice because things look just so much better and more alive. We'll go later into this, but at the same time, this very accurate bound sliding simulation is also very important because we need to choose our colors wisely for the objects because it can be there's unrealistic values. Things can be too dark or too bright or too saturated. So that is something to keep in mind. So now, this is all for, like, localized lighting, right? So when we have, let's say, a sunlight, things change a bit. So this is the directional light here. And now you can see it basically it comes just from one direction, but it doesn't have, like, the things that, like, the spotlight has with the cone and also the shadow doesn't feather the same way. And the reason for that is the sunlight is something that we call, like a parallel light. And that means that the rays from the sunlight are not emitted like this, for example, from a spotlight. But the rays from the sunlight, they are actually emitted parallel. So they all come parallel. And the reason for that is even though we have the source as the sun, it is just so far away that we don't get this feathering effect anymore. So we call it a parallel light and it just, like, works when we drag it in and it just hits everything like this. It doesn't have a distance or anything like that. It's just here. So when we look at this, we can see that, like, Hey, we do actually get a little bit of, like, red bound sliding. But the thing is that is usually not enough when we just look at what happens in reality. And there's a lot more lighting. Like, stuff is not like this dark in real life on where the sun doesn't hit it. And that is because we have one of the most important light sources, which will also be one of the most important light sources for our work here in unreal in, like, video games or, like, lighting in general. And that is the sky. And the sky is absolutely fantastic because what the sky does is, let's do this again. So here we have our little sphere, and the sky is what we call a hemispherical light because it's basically simplified. We have the sky around us. So what happens is that the sky shoots rays from all these directions so it is a super, super huge diffuse light. And by diffuse, I mean, is that the shadows that the light creates are very, very, very soft. So, if you go out on a cloudy day, you have no sunlight, you'll see that all the objects, they do get like, you know, this, like, very subtle shadowing underneath them because the skylight doesn't hit there, but everything is kind of like lit evenly. Which is why people that do a lot of photo scanning for assets and stuff like that. They tell you, go out on a cloudy day when you want to photo scan rocks or trees or stuff like that, because the lighting is going to be very, very soft and what we call non directional, because it comes from all these signs. Now, the thing is also that when you look at the exterior, if you're not, like in the middle of New York and you just look at another house, the sky is also one of the things that is almost always kind of 50% of what you see. Or I mean, like, you know, if you're very depressed and you just look down all day, then you may not see the sky. But generally speaking, right, when you look at, like, forward, the horizon line when you walk, like the sky is always there. It's very prominent. And the sky has a huge dynamic range of lighting intensities, and it creates just crazy colors. So like, sky is pretty much the most important light source in our world. So what we can do is we can go to the light step and we can actually add a skylight. And the great thing is that nothing has happened. So why is that? Why has nothing happened? So the skylight can do two different things. First of all, I'm going to set this to movable, and I'm actually going to set this to movable, too. So even I forget this all the time, because it's just kind of weird that it is stationary, yeah. So the skylight can do two different things. It can either capture the sky that is around the level and use that as a light source for the scene. Sending rays exactly as described in this picture here, or you can actually feed in a cube map that is going to be projected on a sphere, like we don't see the sphere, but it's basically the cube map is like spherically projected around the whole world and then used as lighting. So what we're going to do is we need to first create ourselves a sky dome that the skylight can sample. We will look at this one here, which is the specified cube map where we can feed in the cube map here when we do the prop rendering. But generally speaking, I use the captured scene because I'm mostly working with, like, proper environments where I actually do want to have a sky as a backdrop. So what we're going to do is we're going to take this beautiful sphere here. We're going to duplicate it. And now we're going to search for shadow, and you can turn off like this, but I'm a little bit paranoid. I'll turn these ones off first and then this. And the reason is, I'm not sure if it's still a problem in On roll five, but he is some weird issues in OnRul four, where I was turning off the main switch, and these were still on and I still got some glitchy stuff with some shadows being cast. So what we're going to do is I have my neat little lighting folder here. So we're going to create ourselves a Skydome material. So we're just going to do M underscore sky. Let's call it master as well, because we may actually create instances and flip stuff around. So we open this guy and on the root. So if you don't see the root, you just click empty space or you click the root. We have a bunch of settings. And the first thing that we're going to do is we set this to unlit. The next thing that we do is we're going to set this to two sided because we actually will end up inside this sphere. And if we don't set it to two sided, it will be invisible. So the next important thing is, and this is one of the best tips I can give to anybody regarding lighting stuff. You always want the biggest collection that the world has to offer when it comes to sky textures. Like, seriously, this is just a fraction, but, like, I have so many of these, like, images laying around because they're really important and they're fun and they're good, and you want them because they make things look good and they're awesome to work with. So you can honestly never have enough HDR images. One important thing here, usually when you download HDR images, they're mostly in the actual format, which is dot HDR. Those ones are being considered as cube map, and they can be used for the skylight to be fed into the specified cube map thing. And when you put them inside a shader, you need some projection math to make it appear correctly, and you need some more math to be able to rotate the sky texture. I really dislike that workflow. So I figured out at some point when you do just open the texture in Photoshop and you save it again as an EXR, once you drag this in, it actually is a proper texture sample. And the reason why I'm using the editor sphere is it has the perfect UV layout where that texture just maps onto perfectly. I'm going to hold M and click, which creates this sweet little multiply. I'm going to connect this into emissive color. I actually going to right click the texture sample and say convert to parameter as well, so we can change this sky text, sure. Now I'm going to hold S, which creates a scalar parameter for me and I'm going to call this brightness. Bloop. And we're going to feed this in and we're going to set the brightness to one. And now you can see we perfectly have matched our sky dome onto this. Gonna hit Save and browse so we have it ready, and then we hit the sphere, and we just put that guy on there. So now, interesting thing, the skylight has this thing here, which is called sky distance threshold. And this value has caused confusion to many people I know because basically, what happens is, let's assume that we have our skylight here, okay? And the skylight is going to look into all of these directions and then capture the image to create the lighting that will then be used on the dome, right? So let's imagine that we have some mountains back here, and then it goes like this and some more mountains, and then some trees, very beautiful trees here. I'm not going to make them green for you. And we obviously have our sphere. So what happens is that the skylight sees the tree, it sees the mountain, it sees the sphere. So it captures a lot of stuff in there that we may not actually want to have there. This becomes even more important when we actually going to use a procedural sky, which we're not doing right now. We'll get to that when we do the outdoor lighting. So what the distance threshold is, it basically says, ignore everything in a radius of 150,000 units and just capture everything behind it. So what that means is that you either need to have this sphere bigger than this threshold, or you need to lower the threshold. Otherwise, the skylight won't actually see what is happening on your sky. So what I usually do, I'm going to hit the lock on scale, and I'll just type 15,000, and there it is. And now if I go to my directional light and I do effect world, so we can see nothing has really happened. And the reason for that is because the skylight does not automatically capture and update every frame. You can do that if you choose the real time capture, but the real time capture does not consistently work with a static sky like this. It works when we use the sky atmosphere system, which is a simulation of an actual atmosphere. So what we need to do is we need to either change a value on the sky so it kind of like recaptures. We can hit effect world and on off, and now you can see something happened. We can scroll down and hit recapture or we can go to build and we can say Build reflection captures that just does the same thing. So one thing that I also like to do for my skylight is I like to increase the resolution to at least 512 because then it sees more details of all these little things because if the resolution is too low, this cloud might just be one pixel, but you can see that the cloud here is darker than it is here. And that is actually what I meant when I said before that skies are so beautiful because they have all these different values. So if your resolution is too small, this whole thing may just be one pixel, and then you don't actually get the difference between the brightness. And you could also see that the lighting has changed like if I go back to 128 and you can see it let's make it really bad. Well, this is actually great. We're not really seeing that much difference. Good stuff. But I guess that's also because of lumen because lumen is real time and Lumen is not as precise as static lighting. So if you would do some static light baking, this resolution has actually quite a big impact on the quality. There you go. Now you can see the bump. I just got more accurate. So this is our skylighting, and as you can see, really what I said before is happening, right, where the lighting comes from the top and from the sides and the object just slightly occludes, right? So if I would just duplicate this and make it gray again. So you can see how we, like, get this occluded here. So this is now occluded from the sky. And we basically get the super soft indirect shadows from the skylight here. And then in combination, we can bring back our sun and now we have the best of both worlds. So we can see like stuff is still occluded. But we also do get the bounces here. We do get the bounces on the ceiling as you can see here, where like, the light just bounces off onto this stuff. So there's a lot of nice stuff happening here. And now you can see stuff gets bright, and this is all the exposure related things. So that is something that we'll look at in the next session. But for now, these are pretty much the absolute basics about the light types that we have and what they're doing. All of this would have been a little bit more painful to go through if we wouldn't have had lumen. So it's actually really nice to finally have some dynamic GI because all the indirect lighting before had to be static and baked, and it, like, could be really cumbersome and there's a lot of stuff to take into account to get some nice light bounces and some proper quality and all these kind of things. So I think that all of you that just jump into this using Unreal five, you can be so happy because you don't have to go through the hoops and all the bad stuff that was a very big thing in the past. However, this is what you have to be really mindful of. If you decide to become a lighting artist or work with these things and you end up going, working in a game studio, or maybe you even are working in a game studio already. Let me tell you that this is definitely not what most people are using right now to make games. Like, it is coming slowly. But again, even though Epics OnRelFV is production ready, I don't think it is if you don't have an engineering team. So if you have people that can fix things like programmers and stuff, so if you are working in the industry, most people still actually work with solutions where the indirect lighting gets baked in many different ways. There's many technologies that do this. But like real time GI, even though it's kind of here, it is not most likely not what you're going to end up using at a studio. So sorry for destroying your dreams there. But anyways, very fascinating technology pretty smooth to work with. And yeah, I've been brabbling for long enough. So thanks for watching this. I hope it was still interesting for you guys and for everyone, like, even though it was, like, you know, very, very basic. But we're just going to keep scaling it up from here. There's going to be some more things that we will have to look at regarding whole sky stuff and exposure. But again, I'm not going to do dry breakdowns of these. I will explain these things in a better way when we actually going to work on some real content. So with that said, see you in the next lesson. Cheers. 4. Fundamentals Part2 Exposure 01: Hello and welcome, everyone to our next lesson. So last time, one of the things that I explained is that the sky is one of the most important light sources that we can use, and it has a very, very big impact on what we get and how our scene will look like. So this time around, I want to go into another topic that I would say is actually even more important than the skylight, because it's something that is incredibly fundamental to how we render images and how we perceive the world, not only as people in real life, but also as gamers or digital artists. And what I would like to talk about now is actually cameras and exposure in that sense, because rem remember that earlier in the first lesson, I said that some of the relationships that we work with digital lighting, they are actually sort of like arbitrary. So they are relative in many ways where we can like the example that I gave was we can values that are vastly different from one another, but we could actually make them look the same. And that is a very interesting and super important concept to understand. I also think that even though it's a little bit more on the technical side of things, it is actually something that will make your work stand out if you understand these concepts. In the beginning, it might be a little bit more hard to follow through with these ideas or to constantly think about what might be right. But at some point, it will become very natural and you will just sort of like feel what's right to a certain degree because based on all the experience that you have accumulated. That is actually something how it works for me these days. So, I have a lot of the numbers kind of, like, in my brain already. I do know a lot of the relationships, and I've worked extensively with these systems. So for me, it's way more creative now. And when I started learning it, it was a bit more technical. But when you have the technical aspects down, it actually becomes something that is incredibly creative. So let's jump right in with that. And the first thing that I would like to show you and that is very important to understand is something that I actually found here is a pretty good illustration here. And if I just zoom in a bit, so one of the big problems that exists within the realm of lighting and digital artwork is basically the difference of how the human eye sees light and how a camera sees light. And these things are fundamentally different because the camera is basically just raw data. And that is also how our eyes work. Like our eyes sample data. The big problem, though, is that we have a brain, and our brain does something with that information. And that is also fairly interesting because when you take photos with, like, a normal camera, like, you know, like a DSLR or just like another, digital camera, like a small camera or even a camera that uses old school film, it looks vastly different than what you, for example, can see on an iPhone because iPhone actually has some smart software in the back that does something. So iPhone actually alters the images when you take them because what they want is that when you take a picture with an iPhone, they want that the picture looks sort of like what you saw. And so it matches the memory that you have of when you took the picture, I was like, Oh, this sunset it looked so good. And that is actually because, again, there is smart tech behind it, so it's sort of like a brain in a certain way. And the thing is that human eyes have a higher dynamic range than a camera does. So like, you can see here, like a compact camera is 5-7 stops of dynamic range. DSLRs can be higher and then we have the human eye, which is 10-14 stops. However, we have the brain aspect. So here you can see the image on the left. It's like if you would focus your eyes on the horizon line in the sky, that is kind of like what you would get. And if you would, like, focus on the foreground, and by the way, these also match what you would get with photography, right? So, you either expose the image so that the sky has nice colors and nice values, and you usually end up with something dark here in a sunset. Or you expose for the foreground, and then the back will just blow out completely. So the thing is now our eyes constantly adjust for the different values, and then our brain actually creates the image on the right, which is sort of like very balanced and very natural. And the problem is that cameras just don't do that. So like, when you work in a cinematic way, then you have to make a decision if you want to work really more like how a camera does work, or if you want to work more with how the eye perceives things. And we can use these light units that I mentioned in the video before. Where we can use actual physicalized units. And then if we use, like, proper camera exposure settings and stuff like that, we actually run into these issues. And so some games decide to narrow the range and all these kinds of things to bring it more together. Like for example, when you have a competitive shooter, and you kind of want to be inside and see the outside properly or you want to be outside and you want to see the inside properly, so you can shoot people quickly and make decisions because you have good visibility. So these games usually work with, like, a compressed or condensed range. And to sort of, like, illustrate what that means, I'm going to draw something beautiful again. So imagine like over here, we have, like, super pitch black, and then over here, we have, like, the brightest thing that you can imagine. And that does not even have to be like the sunlight. This can be like I don't know, like some weird like star exploding in space and just creating the brightest flare that you've ever seen. So, now the thing is, is that our human eyes then basically like see let's make it like this. Let's say, on the left there is like, pure black, right? So let's say like somewhere over here is maybe like a candle. So candle light is very dark. It's not super bright. And then let's say, over here, we have bright sunlight. So our eyes now, they can sort of, like, see this range really well. And a camera can sort of, like, only see like this range really well. And then what that means is that because we can move our camera exposure on this scale, if we're in this range, so we see the candle nie, it means that everything that is outside here in this basically part, it will blow out and become white. The other way around is if we would expose for this side here so we can see the sunlight nicely, everything that is like, for example, inside a building over here, where the candle is, it will be almost pitch black. Like we will not see it with the camera. But since the eyes constantly adjust and then the brain computes a final image, the human eye does not necessarily run into this problem. This is very, very important to understand. And again, depending on what type of content you make, you can shrink these ranges. So you can basically say, like, Well, I will only make the sun so bright that it's over here. So then these both fit into the same range. And of course, you will create an image that is a bit more flat. So there is nothing really that you can do against that if you do that, but it's like a conscious decision when you work with camera exposure. And one of the things that I also want to say before we move on with this is that nailing your exposure and your value balance is probably one of the most important things when working with lighting, like at all. Like, it's usually when I look at, like, student work, for example, or other people's work where they're less experienced, oftentimes I see of course, for example, problems like colors being all over the place. That's also a very common problem. But the biggest problem that I usually see is that the values don't feel right, that they feel imbalanced, and they, in turn, don't create a super pleasing image because it's not always about realism. Often it's just really, like what feels good. Luckily, though, there are a bunch of helpers that can actually help us to nail these things down because like, first of all, a lot of this stuff with the photography elements is replicated in game engines as well. So that means that because we look into the virtual world with a camera, there's a lot of knowledge that is around there in the world regarding how cameras work and how people have been taking photographs for years, and we can leverage that knowledge. And that is actually very fun to do. It's very exciting. And also, it helps us to create something more like pleasing in that sense. So here, I have a scene which is completely dark right now. And if you want to work with this too, right now, I chose one of the samples. So you can just go in here samples and scroll down. And it is the arquis interior that I chose. There are a few tiny little modifications that I made. So the project runs on RTX, so I turned these things off. I removed all the lights that were in the scene as well. So that is something, you know, just so to be aware of that I did a little bit of cleanup here. And now the first thing that I want to do is I want to start with my sky. And the way that I do my sky is, if I'm using a static sky, I always go to the engine content folder, and in case you don't see that, you can go to the settings and you can go to show engine content. And then in the search, I just type sphere. And somewhere here is the editor sphere. And we did that in the last session as well. I used this one because it has the perfect UVs for what I need. So this is a good thing. And then I have my sky material, again, like this. This is just like the setup that I chose for now. So before we actually apply that quickly, let's make sure, excuse me, that we have all the shadows turned off here. Okay, great. And then we apply a one, and suddenly everything goes boom, obviously. So we have our huge light source in here now. This is one of the great things with lumen. It samples emissive materials completely. So like, you do get a lot of lighting from it. And I really like this here where you can actually see how these little pockets of light go through it and also go into, like, the reflections here, giving you some nice soft reflections from the trees and stuff. Really, really beautiful. I like this a lot. So, nevertheless, though, we need to blow this thing up because it's going to be our sky dome. So I'm going to do 15,000 with the scale locked, and now we actually have this. And now you can see that kind of not really a lot is happening besides this just blowing out completely, right? So now one of the things that we need to do is we need to sort of find a balance for this, right? And there's a bunch of ways that we can do this. So if we look at the texture, so I would argue, and we can apply some exposure bias here. So I would argue that this is somewhat a well, maybe like 3:00 or something. Like, it's definitely afternoon. Like, it's not like midday because you can also, if we see the shadows, they're not super long, but then again, they're also not like 12:00 shadows. So this is potentially like maybe 3:00. So we know, okay, this is like early afternoon here. So let's keep that in mind. And now, if I just find my window again here with the Exposure stuff. So here is a very interesting thing that you can find if you search for orders of magnitude luminance. And this is very very interesting because what this basically is is someone went out into nature and measured the brightness, which is here like candela per square meter or what is this? Like, I don't actually know if it's like a kilo or whatever. But so basically, these are the candela values. So this is like 10,000 and here we have the small values. So this is the luminance for a night sky, for example, which is, like, incredibly dark. And here you can already see what I described before that the ranges between certain things are incredibly huge, right? So here, for example, we can see that a white illuminated cloud in, like, full daytime, basically, is 10,000 candela/square meter. Sometimes you will see a value called KITs, and KnITs is sort of like the new value or how it's named today, like a lot of displays and stuff like that. It used to be candela per square meter, but now they call it KITs, but the actual value is they're the same. Like if you calibrate your display to, like, 120 candela, it's the same as 120 knits. So sometimes you just see these different names, but candela per square meter and nITs is the same thing. So now we basically have a number here, right? And one interesting thing as well is that I told you guys, for example, that the sunlight in super strong daytime, it can be like 120,000 locks. It can also be like 85 or 50,000 depending on cloud coverage, like how the atmosphere is. There's a lot of factors to this, right? So the idea here is that we create a pleasing balance between our sky and our sun for a setting that kind of fits this time of day. And there's a bunch of different ways of doing this. So the first way is to basically start with balancing the sky. And for that, I'm going to just fly out, and we can see that our auto exposure is adjusting right now because if we go to the post volume, we actually have nothing set here. So what you can see here per default, we're in auto exposure, and some people really dislike it, but I'm going to show you how we can tame this and actually have it do what we want because I honestly believe that most people that really struggle with auto exposure, they don't really know the right tools on how to actually balance it out in a way that it really works. And I'm also going to explain to you why auto exposure is actually a great thing if you can control it correctly. So for now, I'm keeping it like this. And also, you can see that the sky is right now, like the emissive value is so bright that, of course, everything becomes really black, but also we don't really have working lighting. So let's consider that, too. But for now, so what we want to do is we kind of want to look at these clouds here and then find a spot where, and this is what we also, like I have to mention, there's some artistic freedom in this because, like, we can't actually because, like, this is a photo, right? Like, we don't know what the brightness actually was of these clouds, but we can sort of, like, derive something and be like, smart about it. So let's do that. The first thing that we're going to do is we're going to go to show, and then we go to visualize, and then we're going to go to HDR. And this thing here, it might be confusing, but it's super cool and very important because it helps us a lot with, like, sort of controlling our exposure and measuring different values. And I'm not going to give you guys a breakdown of this right now. However, what I will say is we will look into all of this on the fly and we will learn how to use and interpret it. So right away that you can see here, I have this little square, and these numbers below here, they actually measure just what's inside that square. Sadly, I don't know any way to make the square any bigger. So, I don't know if that is like a possibility somehow to increase the area where things get measured. So we'll have to work with this because if you can increase this, you can get a bigger average of something that you measure. But then again, so here we can see the knits, which is the same as the candela per squameters. Here we can see the lux, which is a totally different way of calculating this. And then we can also see what E V 100 this is, and we're also going to get more into this. So if we remember that when we look at our data here is that, okay, white illuminated cloud. So that is like 10,000. And then we also have around 7,000 for the average clear sky. So the thing is, this is not an average clear sky, even though there is some clear sky, but we will probably not really reach that necessarily. So one thing that I also think is important is that this varies a lot between here and here. So you can see, this is like an average white cloud, and we can read here that is like 18,000. And we can also read over here where we're on 7,000. So why is that, even though they're both white? So the thing is this one here, here's the sun disk. So this one is incredibly close to the sun, right? So the values are super, super high. And if I would just apply some exposure compensation here, you can see that the values read the same. So the data is always the same, right? We're just exposing the image differently. So you can see that this is still, even though I made the whole image darker, this is still way brighter than this one. So here we have to make a smart decision of where are we actually going to pick our like 10,000, right? And I would argue that it's not here. Like, I think, this is the wrong value here. I think that this is actually a more like, working value here. And we can see we're like on 8,000 7,900, which means that over here, we're like on 11 12 on this part. So now what I'm going to say is, actually, I think that this is good. I think that's great, because the 10,000 is also for more like a midday. So in the afternoon, it does get slightly darker, which means that even though we have a white cloud over here, you can see that we are more like on 45000. And that means that we will not reach this, super, super high daytime intensity because that's not what it is anymore. It is an afternoon. So we will not have the same intensities as we would have on a midday. And that will also reflect in how much power we will give to the sunlight. If we would like to change this, however, if we would say, like, Okay, let's make this midday, right? So we would probably go to somewhere like here where we can see, like, Okay, white cloud, perfect, but we're only on 4,000. And the way to change this is to actually open our sky material, and then we just crank the intensity. And some people might look at this value and say, like, Oh, that is a huge number. That feels very unintuitive. And initially, I would say, like, Yeah, I agree. But this is one of the important things to understand when you work with more physicalized values, the values can be very large because that's really how it is in real life, too. So don't be afraid of large values. It's going to be completely fine. There's going to be no problem with this. So let's assume we want to hit something different here. So I'm just going to go with 5,000, and we can see we're on 6,000, so maybe let's go like, nuts. Let's do 12,000. And that was way too much. So let's go with 8,000. And now we are on Is that 10,000? Is that a zero? Yeah, that's a zero. Okay, so now we're on 10,900, so let's go with 7,500. Okay. So now we have the sky balanced out, and you can see it looks exactly the same as before. And that is because our auto exposure is constantly trying to adjust to an overall pleasing value for this image. So now it gets brighter because I'm looking at a dark tree, and now it gets darker because I'm looking at the bright sun. So, the auto exposure is constantly following along, and the actual value that I'm choosing here right now doesn't really matter. So this would be what you could choose if you would then want to go for a stronger contrast between the sun and the sky. But I'm going to go back to my 2,500 here, and you can see it got darker, of course, and now the exposure adjusts again. So I'm going to say, Hey, I'm actually quite happy with being around here with these values. So here we have the 11,000 in this area, 10,000. Here we have like 5,000 because, again, midday. So I'm kind of happy with this, right? So now what we can do is like, let's do the first thing. Actually, let's go to our skylight and actually capture this data because right now you can see we don't really have any lighting. So I'm just going to go to visualize for now, turn this off. And the skylight, even though it is set to movable, it doesn't automatically capture these texture changes. And if we turn on real time capture, it does not work with the sky like this because real time capture is built for the atmospheric system for constantly updating the skylight. So what we need to do when we alter these values to actually see what has been happening, we need to old school go down here and hit recapture. And now you can see we have something. And what you can also see is it kind of some of these colors start matching up with what we see here. So if we look at the shadow side here and we look at this shadowed side, we're actually starting to get some values that seem rather close, which is a really nice thing. And now you can see the thing that I was saying before, like the inside is completely dark. But however, since I have auto exposure turned on, what happens if we go in here? So now it actually starts exposing for this, and we'll get some really nice stuff, and this might be a little bit crazy, which is why, again, we need to sort of tell the auto exposure what to do, as well, because right now, it might be overdoing it. And we also get this one quick thing that I'm going to do is because I actually changed the bloom settings. So let's revert this and it is very intense. So we can either change the intensity or what we actually should do is we should change the threshold because the threshold is not meant for values this high. The threshold here is actually set for non physical values. So what we need to do is you see even eight doesn't do it. So what happens if I do 5,000? So now we can see, since we're using physical values, we need to tell it to not bloom like crazy with this incredibly high value that we have from the sky right now. And per default, again, these values are tweaked for non physical values. So I'm just going to try and find something that works here, and I think we could actually do maybe like 20,000 ops. So we get a little bit of bloom still. Now, let's do 18. But yeah, that's secondary for now. So you can see now we have this kind of working and there's some lighting inside, but again, it is not yet beautiful. So this is the first step of getting something to work, and I think this is kind of like a really nice way of setting it up. So we're going to close off with this lesson here, and in the next lesson, we're going to bring in the sun. We're going to start actually adjusting the exposure, and I'm going to show you a few tricks of how to balance these things out. So thank you so much for watching and see you in the next lesson. 5. Fundamentals Part3 Exposure 02: Hello, and welcome to this next lesson where we continue to look at exposure, camera values, and how to set up an actually pleasing relationship for our image. So you remember last time we set this up. And one thing that I would really like to illustrate before we actually, like, jump into things is Remember when I said that we can make things look the same, even though we have different values. So to quickly illustrate, I'm going to go out here and we can see that our exposure now adjusts. And so if we go to turn on Mint and Max EV, you may have watched some YouTube tutorials or videos where basically someone said, like, you know, I want full control. I'm going to set this to one and one. All right? And now the exposure is locked, and it kind of looks pretty bad, obviously. So now what I can do is I can go in here and I can set my default value to one, and we have this, right? And this basically looks exactly the same as what we had before. So even though my intensity is now one, and I would need to recapture my skylight as well to basically get the same intensity of the lighting, but we're just looking at the background right now. So now my intensity is set to one, and my exposure is locked at one. But this thing is basically, that is not a realistic exposure value for a setting like this. So this would be more like an EV value that you would use for a nighttime. But we can, like, make it work. And this is one of the things that takes a little time to get used to, but it illustrates how the values are, like, really only depending on the relationship that they have with one another. And one of the most important things here, again, is that in real life, the differences between the values is very large, so it makes sense to actually do that when we do our lighting as well. So we actually do get these proper differences between the different settings and, like, interior versus exterior. We get the right contrast between sun and shadow. So that is very important. So if I just change this again, and put this back to I'm doing this off screen right now, but I'm just resetting the value, and we just wait for the exposure to kick in. Now, how would you know what is this number now? Because it can go between minus ten and 20? And the easiest way to find out what number we are actually sort of locked in right now is to do this. And this looks like we are on probably like 11 or something like that. Yeah. So if I would, like, take this and do, like, yeah, like, we're more here where the blue one is. So we would need to do, like, Yeah, sort of like this. And you can see now we're locked in, and it is the same as if we would set this to 11 and just reduce our sky intensity. And that is what I meant with these values are sort of arbitrary. However, this will become a lot more important. So now the question is, how do we actually get our sun in here and have it work properly? First thing that I also want to do quickly is, I just want to look at my room here again, and I want to rotate my sky. And I need to turn off the exposure debug view because otherwise, I cannot really use the gizmos. And I kind of want that the sun comes from over here. Kind of like this, maybe. All right. So how do we actually get this relationship? So now there's a few different ways of doing it, and I'm going to walk you through these quickly. If I take my directional light, which is off, I'm going to turn it on and you can see nothing has happened. The reason for that is because right now, my directional light is actually set to ten lux, and ten lux is literally invisible because of our exposure being 12. We need to crank this quite a lot to make it visible. So let's first of all, go into our skylight quickly and just make sure that we have the latest and greatest in our settings because see, we changed this. So, the shadow didn't match at all because now we're going to have the light coming from here. So now this looks more correct. And then we go into our directional light And now, how do we know what value to choose? We don't really. And also, if you do this, you slide it, like 150 locks. That is completely not physical. So what are we going to do? Well, we overwrite manually. And we just try stuff. So we can do, like, maybe 5,000. And we're like, Wow. Nice. Here we go. So now something really interesting. L, it actually feels like this is not really bright enough if we look at the surroundings, for example. So one interesting thing here is that this building back here, it doesn't really look white to me. It looks more gray. And this is probably, like, reflecting the sunlight. So the actual color is most likely something like what we see over here. And this sphere, this cube, excuse me. This cube has 50% gray value. So this is like perfectly medium gray. So now, first, let's see, does actually. If we look, here's the sun, here's the shadow. So this looks lined up pretty well, so that's good. So again, is this the correct value or is this the correct value? We don't really know. However, what we do know is that we do need some sort of contrast. So having a value that is too low is probably not really going to cut it. It's probably not going to be super good. And we can see here we have something happening. A, we have some nice GI that we started getting. So this seems kind of cool. However, we're still also locked at 12 and 12 is a pretty good exterior exposure. So now there's a bunch of really interesting things that we can kind of use to, like, figure this out. The first thing is we can use our gut feeling, and we can say, like, how strong do I want this highlight to be? So because if I go like, 35,000, for example, this starts hitting really good. And if I look here, that is probably white. So, of course, we don't want this middle gray to look like the white here, which is also hit by the sun. So what we're doing right now is we're basically just looking at what we have and we're trying to find reference points in our sky HDR, which does have some really good values. And honestly, like, looking at this, to me, and that is, like, my gut feeling again and also my experience, this looks too bright. Like, I don't think that the stuff back there, which is kind of like grayish, like, I don't think it blows out that much. So maybe 25,000. So this is something where we can again, decide based on gut feeling, and we can say, like, Hey, I kind of like this. I think this is like a good balance. And again, looks like this inside. I think the bounce that we're getting kind of nice works. We're also starting to get some more filled bounds here. This is one of the things why lumen is so great, because in the past, we just had to, like, test bake this all the time, and we did not really know, like, was it good? Was it bad? We don't know until we bake it. Now we pretty much know right away, which is a great thing. So in any case. So this is one way of doing it. However, if we remember what I said before, there's a lot of ways to do this that are actually derived from photography that help us. And one interesting thing like people do in photography, they sometimes use something which is called a light meter. And with a light meter, they actually measure the luminosity of something that they want to take a picture of, and then they get values, and these values tell them how to set their camera and how to expose the image. And there's one very, very simple rule that I really like using for me to, like, get me the balance that I want is it's basically like midday. Sunny side of an object is four stops brighter than the shadow side. In the afternoon, it's like three stops. In the evening, it's two stops. And at some point, the sun is, like, very, very dim and only adds, like, a tiny bit of color, but not much sunlight anymore, right? So this is actually something that we can use here for our setup. So what we can do is we can go back into visualize. We can go into our HDR value. And now we just basically look at the shadow side here, and now we can see it measures an EV of 10.12 or 13. So that means that if we say, like, Okay, so this is like a medium afternoon, it might be that the sun is like three to 3.5 stops brighter than this, which means we should have around like 1,013.5 over here. So let's measure. What do we have? We actually have 13.5, which now this is the thing, right? I told you, I go to go by my gut feeling, but since I did this so much, I kind of have a feeling for how these things should look like. So I kind of get it more right, like, just because I am that experience. And this is, like, the values is lining up perfectly. And now what you can do is you can say, like, Well, I yeah, cool story, but I want to artistically tweak this, and let's just say we go with like 15,000. So now we're on 12.9, which is still now it's like proper like three stops, more or less. And if I go back to 25,000, it's 3.5 stops. This is completely up to you. However, this is like this contrast that we can see here. Actually, let's choose the median between these two and go with 20,000. So this is what photographer found to be the perfect ratio of shadow and light for a setting like this. And that is one way to do it, right? So if we would, like, now, and this is the beauty of this, and this is why I love this approach so much, like, if I say, Okay, let's do something completely different, okay? Let's Let me just open the sky here quickly on the side. Let's say we're going to do this thing. So here's a problem. If we look at the sky, the sun is actually not really there anymore, but we'll just assume for the sake of argument that the sun would be right here at the horizon, okay? So the first thing is, like, Okay, this was just about the relationship and not the actual values. So what do we have to do? We're going to go in here into our page here, and something has just messed with the colors. Okay. So if we go down here, this is like, typical photographic scene at sunset. Let's say 25 candela/square meter. That is actually really, really low because that's not like 2,500 or whatever, that's like 25, right? So let's just play this through, and I'll show you how easy it is to actually make sense of this. So the first thing that I'm going to do, I'm going to check this shader, and these are, oh, no, that's the wrong shader. Sorry. This one, and we're going to turn this into like a parameter, sky texture. Going to save this. And in here, we just going to create a material instance, call it sky sunset And now, obviously, the good thing if we just, like, open this, we can just, like, overwrite our texture here. No need to mess with anything that we built before. What is this saying? Okay, great. So this is a perfect example. So here you can see that for this texture, it says texture, right? And for this texture, it says texture cube. Now, why is this happening? So per default, when you download a sky like this, it usually comes as an HDR file. And when you import an HDR file into unreal, it actually gets imported as a cube map. So it's basically like a three dimensional texture, so to speak. And if you have a shader like this, a normal texture sample doesn't take a cube map. So when you put a cube map into shader like this, you actually need some math going into the UVs so you can project it properly and also be able to rotate it. I personally don't like that workflow a lot because it's just a little bit cumbersome. So what I usually do is I resave the texture as an EXR and EXR is still internally an HDR file, but I can just drop it in and then when I rotate the sky dome geometry, the texture just rotates with it, which does not happen when you use a cube map. So what we can actually do now is, let's see, do I have a version here? That is already changed, and I don't, which is absolutely fine. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to open this, and it will not tell me like, Hey, photoshop. Okay, let's do this. I'll just drag this in. So now the only thing that we're going to do actually is we're just going to go and save a copy. We're in the same folder. That's fine. I'm not going to call it copy. I'm actually just going to call it EXR. And here, we just changed this to open EXR. And again, it stays as an HDR file internally. No compression. I'm going to hit Okay. So now that this is saved, just going to drag this in here. And I will explain why this one is actually still useful, the cube map. So I'm going to open this and you can see it has the VT. That stands for virtual texture. We don't want this to be a virtual texture at all, so we're just going to search here in the texture settings, and it's just turn this off and it does a little magic, and then we're good. I'm going to save this. And then I'm going to browse for this, so it's selected. I go back to my shader and I'm just going to hit this and now the arrow is gone. A All right. Beautiful. It is still doing something, though? Okay, now we're back working. Cool. So with that said, I'm going to apply this shader now to my ditispere. You can see kind of looks the same. We have all these ranges. So but this is clearly wrong now because this is way too bright, and we don't have this exposure for such a low setting. Because we can see that there's lights in the inside of the houses, right? But these local lights actually have a very low intensity. They might be using 1,500 to 2000 lumen. And if I would put a light in here with that value, you actually wouldn't be able to see it because again, because of the huge range that these things have. So if I'm going to take a point light here, And I'm going to change the values. Down here, you can change the units. I'm going to use lumens because lumens is what you can find on the actual packaging of light bulbs that you buy. So you can basically say, like, Oh, cool, I have this light bulb in my living room, and it has, like, that intensity. So you can then just feed in the value here and you get the same thing. So let's say we go with like 2000. So did you see, I actually did get something, but, like, you know, not really, like, a lot. So if I'm, like, go up here, so we can the light is clearly doing something, right? But you can see if I go out here, this by no means looks like what we can see over here with the lit interiors. And that, again, is because, like, right now, the sky is actually having the brightness of a daytime sky and not of this actual setting. So I'm going to actually keep this light in here. So that's going to be interesting to see. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn back on my HDR visualization thing. And if we remember our sky, like 25 candelas/square meter. So now, again, we get into this field of, like, artistic liberty to a certain degree, right? So if I like measure, you can see, this is like 2,100, there's, like, 4,000 even on the brighter cloud. There's probably a lot more here, but we can rarely see it and also super trick. Like when the values are so bright in the image and you want to measure them, and you can't see the numbers anymore because Epic doesn't have a dark outline for the text. What you can cheat is you basically look at it and it was like, Oh, no, I can't read the number. So you just go into the exposure compensation and you basically just compensate it down, and you see the value is still what it actually reads. So it is the value that you measure is not influenced by this at all, but now at least you can read it again. So that's my little hotfix when I use Again, now, so where do we actually measure? And what I decide for myself in this case is, you know what? I'm just going to measure in the center of the top of the sky dome. And that is, like, again, artistic liberty. Like, there is no rule for this. There is no. But, if I consider this to be an average, right, like, where the sun is, the sky is going to be the brightest and opposite to the sun is going to be the darkest. So my brain just tells me, like, Hey, it seems logical to measure right straight up into the center. So that's what we're going to do. I'm going to open my instance here again. And let me just slide this over. Can I like dp this over here? Yeah, that's better. So, now what we're going to do is we're just going to slide this down until we can read like 25 minutes here. So let's do 200. Okay, so we're still at 2:46 here. So let's actually do 50, still too bright. What was it 25? So let's actually go with 15. Ooh, now we're too dark. Let's go with 25. Okay, we're 30. I think 30 is fine for now. We don't have to match it, like, super exactly. So now you can see that this is a completely different story than what we had before. And now what we need to do is we need to adjust our actual exposure to compensate for this. So what are we going to do? Well, we're going to go into our post process volume, we ignore this, and now we're going to set something that sort of looks good for us, and I'm going to eyeball this. I'm going to say it's probably going to be around seven. And, yeah, that's pretty good. Also, we can see that this looks completely broken, and that is because, of course, we haven't recaptured our skylighting. So we're just going to do that. And now this is completely different. But also we have our problem that it still looks wrong because of the sun, obviously. So first thing for now, just go to, like, turn off this light here because we want to make sure that the stuff that we have is clean. So like, now, also like our song very, very bad thing. I think we can let's rotate the sky a little bit so we can actually maintain our sun rotation here, even though it's like, let's do something like this. Again, I have to recapture because it changed slightly. Now our sunlight is completely off. Of course, it is. We have way too much brightness. We are also not flat enough because, if we have a scenario like this, we would have some really you know, very long shadows, even though, again, I know we don't have shadows right now, but we just assumed that there would be a little bit of sun. So one thing, if you click your sun and your Gizmos weird, that's probably because it's in local space. So you can click this one up here, and it cycles between local and world, so we can just direct this out so we can see this. And so what we need now is we actually need to rotate this to be a lot more flat. So that's the first thing that we're going to do. Now I'm going to switch it actually back to local because now you can see I get the axes a lot better. First, I'm going to fix this a bit. And now what we want to do is like we kind of want to go like this. So it's not super accurate, but it is going to be a lot lower here with the sun coming in like this, And then what we also need to do is we need to actually fix our colors and our intensities. So the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to put this to zero. I will turn on, again, my visualized HDRI eduction. So here we have like 3.6, right? So if we say that we just go like one stop brighter, that would be like 4.6. And you can see we basically already have that because the thing is we don't actually have a sun here, and the brightness that comes from this is basically already the brightest spot here, and we already have this almost one stop difference, but we can see there's a little bit left. So here we are 3.6, here we like 4.3. So we can add 0.3 ish with our sun. So let's do 1020. All right. So now you can see we added a tiny little bit of sun. So there's here our shadow. You can see it. So I remember this number 20 looks, and 20 k is actually pretty accurate for something that is very late in the evening. So I'm going to do 200 so I can see it more. And now what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to match the colors. And one thing that I really like to do and that I highly recommend to any of you use temperature because don't go in and do, like, Yeah, sunlight is like this. Don't do it unless you do something that is A, highly stylized or B, it's something that is, like, I don't know, you know, like a weird planet or something where, for some reason, the sun is blue or whatever, or you have, you want to emphasize on, like, a swamp feeling for, like, an isolated area, and you can, like, maybe, like, you know, nudge it towards something greenish or something. So of course, there is some artistic freedom. But if you talk about, like, regular stuff, don't ever touch this. Keep it on white. Hit the color, and you can see it already got a bit warmer because per default, it's 6,500 kelvin. And 6,500 Kelvin is the white point, basically. So we're going to check this. And since this is very late in the day, we can actually go down quite a bit. We can go to like 1,600. And you can see now this kind of matches the feel, however it is way too strong. So what we need to do, again, is we just go back here and we're going to do 20. And now you can see it does add a bit more, which is not perfectly realistic, but you can see the colors really look nice. And if we go back in here, we can suddenly see that, okay, this kind of seems more balanced. And then if we go to our point light here, actually, let's do like 1,200. That is what they usually are. Again, I'm actually going to turn on used temperature because most of the interior lights work with temperature as well, and a lot of the interior lights are actually very, very warm. That is something that most people don't really know because, like, our eyes also adjust for things differently. But especially when you do, photography, you'll notice that, a lot of the lights that we have inside our houses, our apartments, they're actually very, very warm, and they usually are 2700-3600 Kelvin. So I'm going to go with 3,000 right now. And let's turn it on. And I need to get rid of this. So now you would say, like, Okay, that's still not super bright, right? And that is usually not what you, like, sort of get. And that is correct. So let's just make it a bit brighter by having more lights, which is also a very common thing because when stuff is dark, we add more lights because that's what we also do in our homes when it's dark. So I'm just going to put this in And we ignore, all the shadow casting stuff and, like, all that for now. So this is what we have here. And now the fun thing is obviously that when you look from the outside, let me turn this off. We do have something that matches a lot better when we look at this. I think actually these lights are even warmer, so that's like a difference, but we can see that our interiors are starting to do something as well. So now the thing is this kind of, like, still looks very, very dark and that's correct. And that is because right now the exposure that we have is something that is more pleasing for what we see outside. And again, what we need for this, and this is what games do is we need dynamic exposure. So if we just go in here and we reduce this to maybe 5.5 now we're starting to get somewhere. And, of course, we get this becoming brighter because that is very, very natural to happen. I'm just, like, getting really annoyed with these really hard shadows here. That's not very beautiful, not very natural in that sense. But for now, that's okay. We can change that. But it's also not necessarily super important for what I'm trying to show right now. So here you can see that now we have this setup, and we could maybe even go to like five. So now this matches really well. And if we look at something so bright, it will actually go back to something a little bit different. But again, it will not actually go up to the seven because the default auto exposure always tries to aim for a medium gray average of the image. So if you would like to have this look darker than it did like it did when I did this, but you still want to be able to have the five here for when you go into something, there's two ways of doing that, and we will look at these ways in the next lesson. So this is going to be it for this time. Thank you so much for watching and see you in the next lesson. 6. Fundamentals Part4 Exposure 03: Hello, and welcome to the last part in our little fundamental series regarding exposure and how to set up something pleasing in terms of just overall values and the tools we can use for this. So the last thing I want to talk about here for now is that you may remember that I have the exposure tweaked like this and that if I go outside, it does adjust a little bit, but it never really goes back to this. There's two ways that we can fix this. I'm going to show you one way now and the other way, I will show this in the last project that we're going to do in this course. It is a little bit more involved. It's a little bit more advanced. So for now, we're going to use the simple way. I have my post process volume selected, and what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to scale it down. However, there's a little bit of a problem, and it is that we kind of have troubles, seeing how big it actually is. And if I do remember correctly, I have to see because Unreal has restructured the menus a little bit. There is a way to, here, drop brush pulleys. So if we go to the settings and down to previewing drop rush pulleys, now you can see that it's kind of like shaded. So that means that when I go down, here you can see the intersection, like, really well. And this helps us to scale this a lot better with the size that we kind of, like, need here. And this can be a bit of a pain to do this properly. But I think, I'm just gonna make it. Why is it always deselecting this? Okay. Tiny, tiny, tiny, little bit more. Let's do 0.6. And oh, wow, this is okay. Let's do 0.55. So this should work. And then we're going to scale this one down to 0.3. Oops. Oh, no. Oh, yes, I ha Excuse me. I had this locked, which is obviously not very smart in this case. So let's do 0.3. Now I can basically see this better. So we can also just, like, actually, I have no idea which one it is. That is the wrong one. Here. So here we can scale this better. 0.4. Let's something like this, and then like this. That looks about right. So now we have this scaled. And what we want to do is we want to go down here in our post processing volume, and we want to uncheck infinite extent because what this does is it applies it to, like, everywhere, right? So we want to uncheck this, and now you can see something has happened because now I'm not being affected by this volume anymore. So we're going to do blend weight one. Actually, let's play it safe. We do blend weight two. We're going to have our volume selected, and what we're going to do is we're going to lock this at five and five, which is, like, reasons. So the next thing that I'm going to do is I'll actually hold Alt and I drag it and I create another one. And now I'm just going to, like, scale this a lot. You can scale this a lot, or you can use the infinite extends again. It doesn't really matter. Also, I'm going to turn off the draw brush poles. And now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to do 77 here. So now we have this, right? And then if I select this one again, the first one, there is the priority of this one is one. So the small one will override the big one, and then we have a blend radius, which is, and this one is zero, which is the distance of where it kind of blends. So now if I take this and I fly in here, you can see this is happening. So now we have exposure five, and if I fly out again, I have exposure seven. So, of course, this was just very rough and dirty in terms of balancing this. However, that is one of the quickest way to get control over your interior spaces is by adding these post process volume. And like I said, there is a more advanced version, which will actually use the exposure compensation curves. However, we're going to look at this when we do the big exterior project where we also have the interior, and I'm going to really dive into the Ndy and gritty with all of you to make this work. So one last thing that I would like to tackle and to talk about is how what is EV 100 actually, and how does it relate to, like, actual cameras? And that is something very, very important because you may remember, I said that for setting up your lighting, there's a lot of helpful tools that come from, like, photographers and things like that. So one of the other tools that photographers have is called the Sonny 16 rule. And it's a little bit like this, but there's also a lot more charts and things. You can get so deep and dive into charts. Like, it's madness, but it's also fun. So anyways, what this is is when you're out in the field, you need to set something in your camera, right? You need to set an ISO, which is the sensitivity of your sensor. You need to set a shutter speed, which is how long is the lens open, so how much light hits the sensor, and then you have your aperture, which is the size of the hole that it creates when it opens. And that also increases the amount of light that comes in. It's like your iris from your eye, right? Adjusting the size. So all these three are basically what we call the exposure triangle. And there's the same thing again, you can have like a different aperture and then have like depending on how you balance these settings out, you can have the same looking image, but with completely different values. But that's super irrelevant for now. But it is a little bit like how we balanced these things out before. So what this shows us here is like, Okay, so this is like a sunset setting, right? And this means our aperture, if this was like a photo camera should be four, right? So but what about the other values? And this is the thing. So Sonny 16 usually gets specified the following way. ISO of your sensor is 100. Shutter speed is 125th of a second. And then if you use F four, that is going to let enough light through the camera to give you a pleasing image. So how about we try that? I'm going to uncheck this, and I'm going to switch the metering mode here, and I'm going to use manual. And I will actually turn off the Okay, sorry, I will turn this post process volume off for now. Where is it? Okay. And so we will work on this one, okay? The outside. All right, so I'm going to turn this off, and I will set the metering mode to manual. And now, how do we know what settings it uses? Well, it's very simple. We go down here to the camera tab. And now you can say, we have a shutter speed of 60. We have ISO 100, and we do have F four. So that's pretty cool already. So if we do 125th, it will actually get darker. And ISO is 100, aperture is F four. So now you can see that this is actually very, very dark. And this is another interesting thing because what we did, remember, was that we just took this average of the 25 candela up here from, like, the Wikipedia, right? However, the dynamic range of the sky always changes. So we don't actually know is this sunset because there is no sun. It might actually be after sunset already, right, because yeah, there is no sun anymore. So this may actually not qualify for what we saw here. So this value is probably something where the sun is still visible, but it's a nice sunset with, you know, the red dot there being the sun. So what we can safely assume is we can basically balance our lighting around this value too. We can do that, too. And then it will obviously change a little bit, because, again, we don't necessarily know what is specified here, but we do also have this beautiful picture here that has the sun still visible. And if the sun would be here, this would be a lot brighter. The sky would not be that dark. So what we can do is we can go in here and we can set maybe 50, 150 yeah, I think something like this, to make it look the same as before, we probably have to go, let's do 250, something like this. Now we pretty much have something very similar to before. Again, this is not wrong at all. It is just the values are changing so much that again, artistic freedom, you have to decide a bit. So we may want to bump the sun a little bit here. Because this is kind of like more what we would get during a time of day like this. And then we recapture. All right. So now this matches a lot better. And of course, this color here does not match with this here, and that is, of course, because I bumped the sun and all that kind of stuff. So it wouldn't be like we're decoupling this again because of their not being a sun. However, so now we've used this, right? So we have used this to make this setting work. Now we have a very big problem though. If I go back to my post process volume, now I have proper actual camera settings, which is, of course, really cool. However, if like, this would be a cut scene camera, and then I would switch from a cut scene camera to gameplay. And in gameplay, I would actually use the EV values because I'm using auto exposure and you can't do auto exposure with the camera values. You would need to, like, manually, you need to switch, and you can see, like, no, this doesn't match. So you need to lock this, and now you need to figure out, soo is this like ten? Like, Okay, ten. Now I switch to manual? No, does not look the same. So you would need to figure out, like what is actually happening here. How does it work? And this is because EV 100 follows a very specific rule set. So you can see it actually here. So this is like the Wikipedia for exposure value. And exposure value, again, goes with, like, this is the EV scale, and it translates to these aperture numbers these shutter speeds here at ISO 100 intensity for the film. So what I can do now is like, Okay, I have my shutter speed at 1:25, my ISO is 100, aperture is four. Cool. So I can look into this. So here we have the line for aperture is four. I have 125th, and that means my EV is actually 11. So now if I go in here, and I switched this to auto exposure, and I switch this to 11. And now I switch back and forth. You can see they're exactly the same. And this is the importance to understand that like EV 100, even though these are these numbers that seem similar to FSTOps, they are not F Stops. And you can basically create these settings first and translate them to EV 100. Or you can say, I actually want to create the EV 100 setting first, and then you can do some math to convert it into something over here. And now the question is like, Okay, but this all seems random and arbitrary. Like, how do you cite where to go with these values? And here, again, is where the photography becomes incredibly useful. So the shutter speed at the ISO don't matter as much in the video game realms. But what is really important is the aperture, because the aperture is what creates depth of field, right? So if you have a lower aperture of, let's say, 1.8, you get a lot more depth of field. So let's say you don't want that much depth of field. So how do you like, basically get these values with a different aperture? So of course, you can go in here and you can look at this line, and you can say, like, Okay, I need EV 11, but I need an image that is super crisp, right? So, I basically need like, let's say, F 16, because when you have F 16, your image is going to be very, very sharp. And that will translate to actually one fourth of a second in terms of, like, shutter speed. So what we can do is we can do this. This. And we're actually, sorry, that was the wrong way around. Let me quickly let me quickly check this here again. I'm going to do one like Because, like, these are always kind of, like, actually, I have something really fun, which is Where is it? Just 1 second, because the screen is messing with Okay. Okay. So here we can always basically put these in. So we can say, whatever we kind of want to have here. So we can calculate all these nice values of, like, Okay, let's see. So I have one 40th of a second, I have F 16 and my ISO is 100. Let's go in here, and I can compute this. So that means that my EV is actually like 13.33. And so here you can just use all these things, and it can get really convoluted. But for example, one reason why this is really cool is let me quickly open this on the side. So when quite often when I work with lighting, I actually use, like, reference from flicker because flicker is really amazing because it shows you the camera values of what something was shot with. So you can, like, replicate it. And that is incredibly powerful. So let's try something. Let's try, like, sunset street goops. Let's try to find something that does not look super photoshopped. So here you can also see the limitations of camera, right? You can clearly see this is exposed for this and this blows out. So let's see. Okay, so here we have this, right? So this is the data, okay? So we have F four. Wh Why does it always move my stuff around here? Okay, so we have F four, like here, and we have 1640 of a second. So this and we have ISO 320. Okay. So now we have an EV 100 that is 11.67. So if you would basically say, I want to create a photographic scene that looks like this. And now it's not broken again here anymore. Okay, so this is weird. Yeah, sometimes because the monitor I have on the left, where I sometimes, move the windows between, it's an HDR monitor. And sometimes the visualization of the browser kind of breaks when I move it from the HDR screen. So it's actually not that blown out. And I thought it looked a bit, like, intense, but I thought, maybe that's just how the picture was taken. But anyways, so now we know, like, this shot was taken with EV 11.67. So what we can do is we can just, like, put this to this one. And we can do, like, 11.67. And also, I mean, obviously, we were already, like, pretty good here 0.67. And now what we can do potentially is we can basically now adjust the lighting in our scene to match this reference based on the EV values that we extracted, and we know that these are the settings that we can set on the manual camera. So that is a way of working and exposing your images correctly. So you can work with the reference. And we can clearly see that looking at this here, we can actually make our sky a bit brighter. So this is definitely very close, but still we can make this brighter a little bit. And then we'll also get more lighting here on our stuff. Because if we look at this stuff here, that is very close to the streets that we saw before. So it should definitely be more around here in terms of exposure. And not exposure, excuse me, in terms of intensity. So I raised it 250-709, and that is a lot better. And we can go here into our skylight and recapture this. So yeah. And then obviously for something inside here, we would need to completely modify our values again to have this, like, nicely visible and not be so dark. But again, this is very classic the differences between all the values. So I hope this was really insightful. I know these things are a bit convoluted, but understanding camera exposure and the relative values that come with it, so to speak, it is so important, and it's going to make your work look really balanced. So I really, really highly recommend try these things out, try the different techniques, try to, like, get some free content from the epic marketplace, like some city streets. And, you know, like, even just looking at this one again here, like, oh, take the free city sample from Epic, the one from the Matrix demo. Take it. Create a sky like this. These sky domes that I have here, they're all from Poly haven. They're all free. There's many, many online resources to get, like, good sky HDR textures. So like, use that and then take these settings and try to make it look the same, so you can just learn. And you'll also see like here, for example, this is very good. There's a neon sign. And this neon sign is not completely blown out. And of course, it is not because the neon sign is actually not super intensely bright, and we still have a lot of light. However, if you go to, like, Japanese oops, Japanese street, can I write Street night, you will see a lot of pictures where the neon signs are way more blown out. The whole lighting is a lot more blown out. And that is, of course, because the exposure is raised even further because the environmental lighting is so low. And once the lighting from the sign starts to actually become visible because of the exposure that we have, the sign itself will start to really blow out, like we can see in these examples here. All these concepts are very important to understand. And again, we'll tackle them again when we work with the big outdoor environment. But this is it for now with the fundamentals of what I consider to be really the important things to understand when it comes to lighting. I hope it was really interesting and also a bit fun to watch. And with the next lessons, we're going to start doing some proper content work, and we will look at how to render out props and take beauty shots of your assets or works. And we can look at characters, too. So that's going to be what's up for the next one. I hope you had fun. Have a great time, and thank you so much for watching. 7. Rendering Prop Assets Part1: Hey, hello and welcome to our next session in this course. And which one we will look at some proper well, good stuff this time around, which in this case, means that we will actually work with some asset presentations. So this is a topic that is interesting for, like, pretty much everyone, be it like students or professionals, because, like, when you're a student, you want to attract some potential employers with the quality of your work. And even though as a professional, you kind of want to some degree, do the same thing, but also you just want to show off your work in a good frame. So we're going to look at this over the next few lessons here and some of the content that we will be using will be this FPS assault pack. It used to be free. So, I have just like a bunch of these in my library, and this is actually something that I would recommend to everyone. Like go into these, like, monthly free collections and stuff like that, and just try to get your hands on as much free content as you can, because it's always really nice to have it at your hands in case you might need it. Especially for me, since I'm a lighting artist, I don't actually build a lot of my own assets. I mean, sometimes I do. But quite often, for me, it's also just interesting to get some stuff for free from the marketplace. Sometimes I buy stuff too, and just use that to create, like, good moods, lighting, test out things like all these kind of different ideas. So we'll be using the weapons here. We'll also be using this vehicle, which was free. And then we will also be using some mega scans and some of the cars from the city sample. That was the matrix stuff. So, yeah, that's the content that we're going to be working with. Again, I don't think that the weapons and the tank vehicle thing is still free. But, you know, maybe you happen to have it as well. Otherwise, there's, like, other free, like, weapons and vehicle assets that we can get. So it's not really that big of a problem. So with this out of the way, let's jump right into Unreal. And I think that what we're going to do is fairly interesting because I think that a lot of people usually do all sorts of presentations also in, for example, Marmoset. And so there's absolutely nothing wrong with doing it in Marmo set. I do want to give everyone though, like, a little thing to think about, which is, like, when you want to be hired as a game artist, it is very important for a potential employer that they can see your skills with the tool set that you potentially end up working, right? And of course, not all studios work with unreal. However, a lot of the techniques that we use to create these images that we're going to do they're like similar ish in different internal technologies or, like, even in unity. Like the workflow might be different, but the concept that's behind it is very similar. And one thing that I personally dislike might be too strong of a word, but one thing that I think is more interesting for me when I review stuff in a position where I'm looking for people to hire is when I see someone do something in Marmoset I don't necessarily know how good is their technical skill with a game engine, actually, because the problem with Marmoset is, yes, it is sort of like a real time renderer, but they have introduced so many more tools that actually increase the quality tremendously that are not fully real time anymore. So that's one important thing. So when you do the proper render out screens thing, it upscales a lot of the effects. It even modifies the effects. So, for example, for reflection tracing, it uses a lot more rays when it renders out the beauty shot than it does in the viewport. So it's not only that it renders a higher resolution, it's also that it renders way higher sampling that would not actually run in real time anymore. So that's one thing. But the other thing is, it is not crazy hard to make good looking materials on Marmoset. And if someone makes some really sophisticated, cool looking shaders and unreal and also understands the components and how to combine them in a certain way, to me, as a potential employer, it tells me more about the actual skill set of the person on how to make something look really good inside of a game engine. And that is the only reason why I personally prefer seeing like portfolio work and all that, like rendered out from a game engine and not from Marmoset. Also, in the past, when I was a bit more active in the Unreal forums, a lot of people did actually struggle with achieving the quality that they achieved in Marmoset instead of Unreal. So they were like, you know, asking like, is this even possible to get this to look that good? And I'm here to say to you like, Yes, of course, it is absolutely possible. So well, let's jump right in. One thing that you notice over here in my top left, we have this texture streaming pool budget issue. That is not a super big problem. It is, like, for some reason, Like, the budgets of things have been increasing over the years a lot. Like even like epic content uses a lot more like bigger textures, more textures. But for some reason, they never actually updated the confic files internally to reflect the changes of generation. So these values are still the same pool size values from like eight years ago or something when like Unreal four became publicly available. That might Is it eight years? I think it's eight years. Who, time flies. Anyway, so what we can do is we can go down here into the console and we can type dot streaming the pool size, and now we see it marked here. And the good thing is, if we just hit this, nothing really happened, but we can look at the output log, and then we see this is 1 gigabyte right now, and that is definitely not enough for modern production things. So with the output log open, we can click the C and D again, and then if you press the arrow up, we actually get the same command again that we had. So one really valuable tip is anytime you want to put in these commands, if you just put in the command without any number or setting and you look into the output log, you'll actually see what is it right now? And then you can either take a mental note or you can write it down. Probably that's better, at least for me because I'm sometimes all over the place with my thoughts, and then I don't remember, and I've already changed it. So that's one thing. Also, if you just change it here and you forgot you want to have the old value back, you can just restart unreal because these overwrites they're only per session. They're not like now the new default forever. So what we're going to do is we're just going to go in and type 3,000. And now you can see that we have this and For some reason, we're actually not really getting an update here. That is rather hilarious because this is all good. Well, we'll see if this continues, and if we get any issues, it might actually also be just like a bug that can happen sometimes, especially since well, we are above 5.0 in the version, but, like, you know, anytime you fix something, you break something, that is usually how it goes. So looking at these portfolio renders, there are obviously many, many, many, many different styles in doing these, right? It comes down to something like your tastes, your artistry, many, many different reasons, right? So let me just, like, Google something on the side. So if, for example, lets you know, we're going to start with the weapon. So, if we look at this, right, first thing, like, there's stuff that I personally would consider to be less tasteful. So I would say, like, Hey, that looks cool as you know, like for working with it, for example, this one here when we have this weapon. So this is something where I would use this to work like this in substance painter or Quixel or whatever when I actually texture the thing. But I would never use this to present a weapon in like a portfolio shot because it's sort of like it's too random. We could look at this one here where we also have the weapon floating in space. However, this one, and again, my opinion might taste, this one is a lot better because this one does not have a blurry background, so the focus point is completely on the weapon. And obviously, we have some very meticulous, sort of, like, lighting, highlighting all the shapes of the weapon because weapons have obviously a lot of geometry that goes into them, a lot of little things sticking out here and there. And then, most importantly, weapon they live and die by their surface definition. It is not easy to be a good weapon artist. It's a very, very hard job to make weapons look really believable and sell the different types of materials. So this is actually quite good. I also really like is a different kind of presentation, which is, first of all, it is on a surface, on a material, this one. And then, second of all, which, personally, I'm a huge fan of that is to actually have a little a few add ons, like, you know, like this, I don't know what it is, like a magazine extension thing or like, Oh, probably, it is the magazine. I'm disclaimer. I'm not a weapons guy. Like, I have I may say something stupid and anybody listening will be how does he not know? I'm like, I am not a weapon guy. So I'm all about sexy materials and these kind of things. And I've looked at a lot of weapons and surface definitions, but I don't know technical things of weapons at all. So now you know. Anyways, I really like Oops. I really like stuff like this where the weapon is sort of grounded. Here, this is nice because we get some focus. We get a little bit of depth of field. I do not necessarily like the texture of this, for example. I kind of like this more, also with, like, the logo and stuff. So think about these things. There can be, like, a lot that goes into the presentation of a weapon prop or something. Stuff like this, I kind of feel a little bit conflicted about it, as well, because one thing is, like, yes, it sells the surface definition and all that. Like, you can see, like, this looks really like metal and this, like, plastic. I just think the perspective is a little bit unfortunate. Also, it's kind of like it's not really like what the weapon would look like in first person. It's it's similar age, but still it's a bit, like, off. So like, these are a lot of things to consider. This is actually quite beautiful, I think. It doesn't like it still has, like, a background that is sort of like, you know, like, there are some shapes, but it's by no means as busy as this one. So it doesn't really take away anything from it. And it just schmoozes around the weapon very beautifully. It's a very clean presentation, and you have a logo here. So that is the first thing to know that these are all kind of different in many, many, many ways. And what we're going to start with is we're going to start with a floor because what we also will be doing is we're going to sort of build a multipurpose scene as well, so we can use the scene not just for weapons but potentially for the vehicle for other things as well. So what we're going to do is we're going to go to our engine content and we type templates or well, something close to this and let's filter here for static mesh. And we're going to work just with the template for for now. So I'm going to drag this in, and this is where we are. Let's for convenience reasons, zero this guy out. And now that we have that, the first thing that we need is we need a proper material for this. And what we're going to do is we're going to build sort of like a multipurpose material that we can use for multiple different things. So here we have a material that is called floor. And as you can see, there's not a lot of purpose with this one. So we only have a color here, which is very dark. We do have some roughness. So the first thing that I want to do is I want to introduce some switch parameters. There we go. And we call this base texture enabled. And per default, it's going to be false. And we're going to put that in here. And we don't worry about the arrow right now. And then we're going to do the same thing here, and we just call it roughness texture enabled. And again, falls, falls. So now, here's an interesting thing. Like, I usually don't add normals to my floors. You can. You can even go further as when you render, like, organic assets, like rocks and stuff. You can actually, instead of a floor, use like a terrain and then still use, like a flat color for your terrain. So it looks like a proper, like acid presentation floor. And then when you drop a rock there, you actually add, like a paintable terrain layer with some really nice blending, that is, for example, some pebbles. Then around the rock, you paint a terrain shader with the pebbles that bleeds into the presentation floor. There's a lot of different things you can do. And for pebbles, you would probably want some normals. I believe that for stuff like this, you don't really need normals. Like, the most important texture for me with stuff like this is the roughness. And what a lot of people or what I usually tell my students and what really helps them to understand and make materials more readable is that I tell my students roughness and normals is actually the same thing, but on a different level of scale. And once you start thinking about it like that, you realize that you can actually get away with a lot of surfaces that look really good without actually using normals, because you don't always need that very deep information. Like if I take ascending paper and I put it on, like, a very smooth surface and I start sending it, like, that is something that you would replicate with a roughness texture. However, if you scale the sanded area up like, you know, if you could virtually just, like, take it and scale it up, or if you would zoom in with, like, a microscope, you would see, well, yeah, that kind of looks like someone took, like, needle and actually really put crevices into the surface, which you would then reflect with a normal map as soon as they get big enough because that's when the normal map kicks in when you see these shading differences. But it's on a much smaller scale, which is what we call microfacets, but it is geometrical detail that changes the surface. So it really helps you to think about surface variation and stuff like that to make materials interesting like roughness enormous exactly the same thing just on a different level of scale when speaking in physical terms. Anyways, little course here. So what we're going to do is we going to introduce some textures here, and I don't think that I have something cool in here just like randomly. Let's see. We never know because there was actually some test level thing that came with the master level of the vehicle. So I hope I didn't cut out there, but, like, the computer was just hanging a bit while it was trying to load all these textures. So what I'm looking for Yeah. Okay, this seems a little bit troublesome. So what I'm looking for is actually some tiling texture content. So let's just start here. There's just too many, high resolution things in here. So it kind of, like, starts fetching it from the external hard drive, and I think it just starts lacking. So sorry for that. Nothing much I can do about this. Yeah. So there's not really some super good stuff in here. So what we're going to do, and this is actually perfect for illustrating what I want to do here as well. So we're just going to get it straight from Quickle. One thing that really annoys me. I'm not sure if other people have that problem, but I guess they do. I have to sign in every time into Quixel Bridge when I open it with Unreal, even though I say remember me, so I don't have to do that. For some reason, it just never remembers me. So one really cool thing is this here, the imperfections collection. I love this thing. It is so good. And there are so many, like, really cool like roughness variations it is just, like, super awesome, really, really awesome to use. And I don't even know what to pick now. There's so much to choose from. I think, let's maybe go with the scratched metal first. And I think highest quality is going to be eight K. Let's not do that. We're going to go with high quality. Just go to hit this. This is really interesting. It didn't actually add it. Okay. Oh, yeah, okay. This is interesting. So I do have to have the filter still on. So now this was added as a virtual texture, and we want to turn that off. We don't need that. Okay. Let's just save this. Okay. Okay, beautiful. So we can do what we do now is, we're going to just add this to both of them. So it doesn't really matter too much. The most important thing is that we actually have something in here. So I'm going to turn this into, like, a parameter, call it, base color hoops. So like this. And we got shoes. Actually, let's do this differently. Let's do, like, a component mask parameter. So this is important because we don't necessarily want to filter out any of these colors, but we also don't want this texture to be green per default. So this one is great because we can then just, like, set here which one we want. And, of course, we need to switch this first as well because we may not actually want it base texture, mask enabled, goes into true and fos goes into here. And now we can decide what we want. And since we probably turn it off per default, we're going to be using the color anyways. But now we just have all the options that we could want. So then I'm going to copy this. And we're going to go in here with the green channel. And one important thing that we need to do is when we apply a texture like this, and you remember, so this is what the green channel looks like. So we may want to have more contrast or more control over all over the values. So what I like to do is I like to use a larp which is this one. I'm going to feed this into the Alpha. Then I'm going to put a saturate in the output, which is like a clamp, but just use saturate a better. Then what we want is the A value is the dark value and the B value is the bright value. So what we can do is we can just call this lows and copy it and call this highs. And the interesting thing, at least it used to work. Let's see if it still works. So if we put this to zero and this to one, the texture is going to look exactly as it was. So if we want to increase the contrast, we can actually go into, like, minus values in the lows and like values above one into the highs. And that way, we can sort of, like, remake the texture. So let's try and see if that works. But first, also, we'll have to apply this to our beautiful ground. And now you can see now we have a material here. Our auto exposure starts kicking in, and this is rather interesting because it is trying to make our really dark base color into something rather bright. So before we continue with this, let's just add in under visual effects. Oh, not a sky atmosphere, but a post process volume. So we have it here. Let's just drag it down a bit so it's not in the way. And then also, what we're going to do is we're going to make it infinite extent. And for now, what we're going to do is the thing that I told you before that I don't do, but this is a little bit of a special case because we're just like slowly getting the scene setup done. Also, I do work a little bit differently when I do these portfolio renders versus, well, actual like environments with more complex interaction. So here now, we're going to lock the exposure to one and we don't really see much, but that's fine for now. The next thing that we're going to do is we're going to really and I mean, really scale this thing up to, like, maybe, oh, sorry, not the post process volume. Go back to what you were. I mean, the floor. Excuse me for that. So we're going to make the floor rather big, and we need to see we might need to increase it further, but it depends a little bit. We'll also give it a little bit more thickness just so leaking reasons and stuff like that. And, of course, we also gonna save our stuff here. Now, we don't have any light source here, so we don't really see what is actually happening. Also, you can see that unreal has this kind of like mode where it's like, it shows the stuff here, even though there's, like, no light. So the soon as we put a light in, this should change. So let's go with, like, a rectangular light. And this is something that to me right now looks a bit like a bug. It is very interesting because usually, it used to be like this in UnreelFord and when you had no lights whatsoever in your scene, that when you put objects in, that you basically get this, almost like this unlit kind of view thing. So it was kind of like having like a fake light. But the moment you actually put in a light source, it basically everything became pitch black and only the area with the light source became affected by this. But it is beautiful that we're actually having this problem right now because then we will find out how we can actually fix it in case something like this happens to you. So we're just going to make sure that we're not in some weird view mode, which it seems that we are not. Let's try something more by bringing in a directional light, which is also completely invisible. So this is definitely something that is buggy. At least I haven't really had that before. Let's see if we have any wonky settings down here. So this is all good. So let's try something. Sometimes it helps to open a different map and then go back into the other one. So we can clearly see that this stuff here seems to be working. And if I go over to my content browser again, and I'm just going to search for a cube and to so we can clearly see that we have some light and some shadows. So that is very interesting. So don't save this and let's go back in here. All right. This is probably the weirdest thing I have seen in a very, very long time. So now, how would we actually fix this? Since I don't exactly know what has happened, I don't really know. However, I can tell you what I did. What I did was I added a new level here, just named it, and opened it. So let's try something else. Let's try the new level and then go with Let's go with the basic one. So we see all of this working. And now what we're going to do is we just delete all of this and we delete this guy, too. And we'll bring in, again, the template floor. Put it to zero. And we're going to add our light. And now it works. So this is really, really weird. You know, I have no idea what has caused this, but it sometimes, I vaguely remember I've had it happen in the past at least once, and it was kind of like it didn't really know what the map was that I added via the content browser. So, you know, I just remembered that this may have been the issue. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to delete the level that I have here in the content browser. And I'm gonna save my current level as. And then we're just going to do render scene again. So, in case that ever happens to you, this is sort of like how you as a workaround, fix it. And that is unfortunate, but at least we still have a scene that we can now work with. So we're going to pause this for now and then we're going to come back in the next lesson and we actually start applying our things and throwing something cool together. So thanks everyone for watching and see you in the next lesson. 8. Rendering Prop Assets Part2: Hello, and welcome to the next lesson. We are exactly where we left off. So let's take our stuff and get it back in shape as we were trying or planning to do before we had that really weird bugging out with the level file. So again, I'm going to take my floor here. I'm going to put this to 20 25. I will also add my post process volume, move it down, so it's out of the way. And then all the same again, infinite extent. Let's set this to zero. And here we go with one, one, So now we can see we have our light source here. It is not very bright, especially since we're now back in the realm of physical values. Even though I locked it to 11, we still have the EB 100 setting applied in the project that I was talking about. So eight candela that's like, well, eight candle lights. That's not very bright. I will go down to Advanced. I'm going to change this to lumens. And that is really like a personal preference. 25 lumens, that is not a lot. So let's go at least with, like, maybe 500. So we'll get something proper here. And now let me find my material. There we go. So we'll put that onto the floor. And for now, you can see nothing really super fancy here. And, of course, you know, let's do let's make an instance first. We can always extend the functionality of the shader later, but for now, which is going to do, like, a material instance for not having to, like, fiddle around with the shader tree all the time when we want to tweak something. So this is applied. And if we look at this, you can see, we have a very high roughness. We don't have any of these enabled. It is very, very dark color too. It's pretty much black. I like to start off this way because I don't yet know what I'm going to have anyways. So usually I just bring in all the elements and then I go from there. And again, it's super easy for us to yeah, tweak this and have, like, different things happen here. So for now, we're just going to stay like this. I will remove this light here again. And so you will see while I do all these things, it will always like, come back to these aspects in some form of, like, from a theoretical point of view. Like, less is more. That is the way that I learned to do almost everything in my life regarding to, like, visuals and things. Like before I entered the video game industry, I was studying graphic design. And even there, it was always like Less is more. The first thing is Less is more usually looks better because it's not over engineered. It's not too busy, which is something that I see a lot with student work or just people that have less experience that they add, too much of stuff. Like, if you just look at this here again, it is just so simple and so pleasing. It just really, really works. And the second reason for doing Less is Me is it is always more manageable. So I know that a lot of people like to spam a lot of lights for their portfolio scenes and like character light, like, a rib here and a thing there, and this needs to be blue, and this needs to be yellow. I don't work like that. I'm really not a fan of that. What I usually start with, I dares, like, always, there are some exceptions, but in 99% of the cases, I always start with the skylight. Now you may be thinking, Okay, why skylight? Well, the reason because I choose the skylight is because the skylight, at the same time is also just the light that allows me to use an HDR. And you may remember that I was saying before that I usually import my HDR textures as an EXR, and then I put them on the sky dome. And I do that because I don't need extra math on projecting an HDR cube map file when I do that. But this means that I was using the SLS captured scene. So for portfolio asset presentation work, I don't really use the SLS captured scene unless I'm doing something very specific. What I always use is the specified cube map because I want to have control over the lighting of my object that is well, actually, disconnected from what I can see in the background. So I don't want the skylight to capture the background and project that as lighting onto my object. So I'm going to use SLS specified cube map, and then what I can feed in here in this cube map slot is actually not an EXR file, but it is an HDR file. So this slot needs a cube map, and the HDRs they get imported as cube maps per default, so that is what we want. So now, I'm going to be very honest here with you. I don't remember anymore where I got all of these. However, it is super important that you have a huge collection of HDR images when you want to do that. And there's obviously many different ones. So you can have, for example, something like this. I'm just going to save this here. So you can have something like this if you want that the object gets lit with all these, like, intricacies of it being in this room. You can also go with, for example, something like this. And these HDRs I actually do know where I got them from. I got them from Ple Haven. And it's really good to try these out and work with them. However, the ones that I collected also over years, are some very specific ones. Ooh. Okay. This is a first Alright, I might need to restart the editor quickly, and then we'll be right back here. Okay, I think we're back now. I do believe that now that I restarted, the message has also gone up here with the texture pool stuff. And I think when I was trying to load in this folder, it was trying to generate the previews and stuff. So it just kind of, like, got really borked. So we're back in action. And so these are very, very specific HDRs that are made for asset presentation and things like that. So these are very, very special. You can see they look weird, but they're basically not designed to create a realistic back plate or anything, but they are purely designed to create interesting highlights, shadings and reflection and gradient on objects for presentation purpose. So that is very different than well using the stuff that we see here. I'm actually curious why the preview is so dark. But what we're going to do now is we just going to take the studio here. And now the thing is here we go, and you can see that we started seeing something, but not really that much. And that is because now we have to control the intensity via the actual skylight ho ho, intensity. So you can see that we need to now do this thing here. Because before that, when we were sampling from the captured scene, we were controlling the brightness basically via the emissive from the texture that we were capturing. This time around, we just feed in that HDR, and now we need to use this one for the intensity. Now you actually see something really interesting here, which is this grid pattern. This grid pattern annoyed me so much, and I googled around so much to figure out what was going on. And it is a problem that Daniel Wright, the guy who works on Lumen at Epic, he hasn't yet replied in the forum to the people claiming that that was a problem or just, like, you know, documenting that stuff in the forum threat where we talk about lumen problems and issues and quality and all these kinds of things. He hasn't replied to the posts mentioning this yet. However, there is a way to kind of fix it. And I don't think that this is the proper way to fix it because it should be, fixed, like in the back of how things are actually working. But there is this command which is called lumen dot Screen Probe Gather radiance cache zero. So this means that these artifacts are caused by the radiance cache. And if we turn off the radiance cache, you can see the artifacts are gone. This is not a very elegant fix, again, because the radiance cache sort of is important, especially for performance reasons. However, it doesn't really matter in a scene like this. So in a scene like this, we can totally turn off the radiance cache. But speaking long term, this is definitely something that should be fixed. So now this does not look good at all, and it doesn't really matter right now. So what we're going to do is we just going to throw things in, make the scene work, and then we start tweaking the values as we need to. So now let's look into this thing here, and I think there should be some stuff in here, for example. So if we do this, we can clearly see that we have something here. And we can clearly see that we are getting some lighting that comes from our HDR. So the thing is we don't really see which part of the HDR is where right now, but we do know that if we open this again, we do know that we have at least these three very bright windows here. And we have some over here. So since it turns around, like, you know, wraps around a sphere, we know that this one is probably going to end up on opposite of these ones. So we do get one here. This could be the small one, and we do get something way more intense here. This could be the big ones. And then we can obviously rotate our object or we can just, like, rotate the cube map. Alright. So this is usually the first thing that I do before I do anything with, like, actual lights. And what I also do is, I think of, like, how will I present this, right? So let's move this kind of like a little bit more to where the center of this whole thing is. So let's say we take this weapon and we'll rotate it 90 degrees. And I'm going to turn off the grid snapping here. And we can see that there will be some problems here with some of the stuff, basically, like, sticking into the floor because as you can see here, we do have this issue of it kind of looks nice here with the ambient occlusion, but you can also see that it doesn't really, like, hit here. So what we potentially should do is we should think about a way. How can we make this look a little bit more like organic? And one thing that I want to try is I want to kind of rotate it a little bit, kind of like this. So now you can see it feels a bit we still have a clipping issue here, which I am just very elegantly going to ignore right now because this is a lighting tutorial or course in that sense. And I do like this a bit more when it sort of sits like this. Now what I'm going to do is I will duplicate this and then I'm going to turn on the snapping again. And we're going to try to do this. I'm just going to put them next to each other like this. Why is my camera so fast? So this is something that we can adjust here. And then when we have these speed levels, you can also use the mouse wheel to sort of, like, increase or decrease inside of that speed level. So now I'm at the lowest with the mouse wheel, and this is basically the lowest that three can go. And for this work, we should probably go to two, so now we can see it's super slope, but then I can go up with the mouse wheel if I need to navigate faster. So this is kind of like the best of both worlds here. Yep. Kind of like this, I think. It seems that I've, somewhat messed the axes up quite a bit here. But that's fine. Again. So, and now you can see this is actually starting to, like, not look super bad. And now one of the before we continue tweaking this, one of the most important things that I can tell anyone is don't use the viewport camera when you do these things. Like, now we have an initial setup. This is fine. So viewport camera, no problem. However, never, ever, ever render things out with the viewport camera. Never tweak the lighting and your shot with the viewport camera because it looks bad and unprofessional, because the FOV is like bork and you don't really have proper controls. So always always use the Cena camera actor. Like, just always use that one. So what we're going to do is we're going to unhide this body here. We right click to say, pilot the camera actor. And now you can see that everything is kind of like a little bit different and, like, it feels a bit like wonky and stuff. So the first thing that we kind of, like, need to decide is, what is the actual camera lens that we want to look at this with? So per default, there's a bunch of settings that we kind of, like, need to look at. And here, again, I have teased it before. It is actually really beneficial and important that you do know a little bit about cameras. So the first thing is, like, I'm not going to use digital film because that's not how you take pictures. Well, you film, but I'm going to use DSLR. So this gives me the sensor size. And then for the lens settings, I am not going to use universal Zoo and what I recommend to all of you again, personal experience and preference is only use the prime lenses and don't go below 50 for, like, stuff where you want to close up, like, show your objects. Because when we do these kind of lenses and we go in, do you see how it kind of feels like really skewed? Like how the object feels like super weird and skewed? Because now we have a 12 millimeter. So if we do like a 50 millimeter, it already looks like more how should we say like perspectively correct? So I would, like, say, let's choose like an 85 for now. And then we just, like, I need to make this slower and slower and slower. And then what I'm going to do is now I'm going to go out of this. And while I have it selected, I will make sure now you can see that my gizmo is completely off here. I'm going to switch this to local space. I'm going to hit the rotate, and then I will actually rotate this like this. All right. And now I need to see how I want to move it further. I'm constantly switching back and forth here between the different modes. Okay. Now I will go back into this. And everything is obviously very blurry. So what we need to do now is we need to refocus our camera. There's a bunch of ways to do this. You can just choose the picture here basically to sample something that you click on. It doesn't always work super well. You can also track an object here that you enter, which is probably one of the simplest ways to do it. If you want even more control, you can enable the debug focus plane, and now it's so far away that it is probably behind the floor. So what you can do is you can just drag, drag, drag. And there it is. So now this is the focus plane, and it's in front of the weapons. And if we push it back, you can see, now it starts colliding with them. So now it means that this here where the intersection is, is the point of the highest focus. Since we use a 85 millimeter lens, though, and we're on our current aperture of 2.8, we don't get too much depth of field, but we do get a little bit back here. So if I turn this off, you can see there is a little bit of depth of field that has a smooth transition from basically where everything here is sharp and it transitions. So we can get more depth of field by going down with the aperture to 1.8, as you can see, it just got more. If you don't want any depth of field, like if we go with five, for example, you see no depth of field at all. I do like depth of field quite a bit, as I may have mentioned. So we can do this, and we can just, like, really nail in where we want the focus point to be. Let's say we want it at the tip here. You can see now there's a lot more of this that is blurry. I think we should push it kind of like this, maybe. And I'm also not entirely sure. I may want Not yet entirely satisfied with the With the shot. So now we can do something pretty cool here. Let's try to do this. And let's try to get the most crisp details here where we have the interactions. So now we see that we get this. And it does get rather blurry here. But also, it's kind of like something that I would say looks pretty good. So now, let's just adjust this one here, and you can see that this is a lot more pleasing now. I would also quickly. Look at. Was it the rotation? Yeah, I was this one. Let's make it like this. So now we're starting to get something that does not look like too bad. And now would be the time to look into what do we actually want on the asset itself? Like, how do we want this to look like? And this is where it also gets, like, fun and interesting now. So first of all, we can start by rotating the skylight. And you can see how it does completely change the mood all the time. So actually, let's do something like this. So I just reset this to one. Let's see what happens if we put two. So that's going to be fun now. So now what we can do is we can basically sculpt what we kind of want in terms of how this feels. And we can decide, you know, which is the way we want to massage this in here. So I think this looks quite good. And now it gets really cool. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to open another viewport on my side here. And in the viewport, I will choose the camera actor. And the reason why I do that is because I want to, like, navigate outside of this view. So here's the thing. Like, if you go out of the camera and like, you click it, and now it doesn't actually do this anymore. This is great. Because usually it shows you, like, a little viewport down here, and then you can pin it. Because the thing is, you want to see what you do when you navigate around here and add stuff. So let's try to do it like this. So here you can see the cool stuff. So let's put this here. And now, as you can see, remember when I said Less is more, this already looks really, really good and quite high quality and all that. And we haven't even done that much yet. So this is really all about just, like, tweaking the setting properly, setting up a camera that frames the shot well. This is like, absolutely no magic. This is just pure, let's say, good planning and foundation work here. So now what we do is now we're going to actually add a rectangular light here. And now you can see, like I just throw this in in, like, the most, like, stupid way ever, and it's still kind of like, Oh, it's kind of nice. So you see here these issues that we're getting. And this is because what is it called again? The shadow I'm so bad with remembering these names. Let's see. I'm like, scrolling down here settings, project settings. Rendering. So I have the yes, virtual shadow. So like I have the virtual shadow map turned on, and this is really good for exterior stuff. It can also work decently enough for interior stuff. But the thing is like the softening of the shadows that you get from it, it definitely has very hard limitations as seen in the earlier lessons. So I have the support for hardware retracing on here, and what we should do is we should potentially, like you can see here, that this looks like quite borked. What we should do is we should most likely take that light and turn on traced shadows because this is the proper quality that we want. So from use project setting, we go to enabled, and now you can see how it instantly turned into some really, really good looking shadows. So if I get close here, you can see how we have this, like, proper effects here. And even if I make this smaller, we can totally see how we get a proper penumbra. So this is kind of cool, but it also looks like someone took a picture with his phone. So it's kind of like the flashlight look, which is actually not that bad. I mean, I've seen people do that in their portfolios that they render everything with this kind of flashlight look, and you'll see, this is the flashlight look, sort of. It gets even more flashlight look if we do take the light here. It's just a bit hard to see. So the proper flashlight look, obviously, is that the light comes from the camera. So if we just, like, rotate this and I hate doing this stuff when we're in a weird space. Yeah, so just, like, rotate this and then move over. So, if we pull this to the camera here, and we just say like, Okay, so this is like our camera flashlight now. So this is kind of like the flashlight look because you always get the shadow in the back. And also, one thing very important, the flashlight is not that big, so we get way too soft shadows. So what we would need to do is we would actually need to make this, like, a really tiny light source. So we get this, like, super strong hard shadow. So there we go. There you have the flashlight look, and it can be fun, but that's not what we're doing today. No flashlight look right now. So what I wanted to do was I wanted to see if we can do something else that is a bit cool here. So, again, you can see, depending on what types of shadows you want, you need to adjust your light size, right? Like the shape of how big is the light actually. Because without it, like, when it's this small, you always get these harsh shadows. Maybe you want that, right? It's like nothing wrong with that. But it all comes down to how do you want to present this? And you can see that this is starting to actually look really realistic because of the values that we have here and how it's all exposed. So now would probably be a really good time to think about what our floor looks like. I'm just going to move this away quickly. And let's go over to our floor instance here. And this now might go horribly wrong. Like, I don't know. Let's see. So let's do this. And there you go. And obviously, I totally forgot to hook up some tiling parameters because I was elsewhere with my thoughts. So let's just do that here. I'm going to do these separately. So I'm going to do this. I'm going to take this here. All right. And then what we will also do is we will just add another scaler here for metalness. So let's save this. What did I Base color tiny roughness tiny. Okay, how does well, whatever, not super important now. Let's go in here and increase this to five. If you bring this back in, we can see that does not look too bad. Now that we have this and you can see this is only the roughness. I did not adjust anything in terms of base color or whatever. Now what we're going to do is we're going to add another thing in here because once we have something that we like, we just might want to bring it up or down. Or actually, I'm sorry, sometimes I think I should do it one way, but then I think, like, nope, let's do it another way. So let's try and basically get this to be more reflective so we get actually some reflection from the weapon here. So the first thing that we need to do is we need to drop the highs. There we go. And now you can see we gained reflection, but we lost some contrast. And what we will need to do is there we slowly go back. So now I'm going to try to massage it against each other to create more contrast with the scratches and still remain some of the reflectivity here. So now we have a problem here because our base color is way too dark for it being metal. So now you can see when we turn this into metal and we have this, we actually get some really nice contact reflection and some other stuff. Although I think we should be a bit darker, so we get a bit more like separation here in terms of, like, weapon versus the floor. Like, the floor is almost, like, too busy looking. So I do think that something like this works quite well. So as you can see, this could already be a nice way of doing this. And it is rather simple here. Like, again, this is nothing too fancy. And what I would like to do is because there might still be a bit of artifacting. What I want to do is I want to go into the post process volume, and now we're just like cranking some of the settings so we can make sure that we're actually getting, like the best quality of what we're doing here. So Lubin global illumination, I'm going to just set the scene quality to four. It should not make a huge difference, but the reflection tweaks probably will at least a little bit. Let's keep an eye open. Sent tail will also help us with smaller shapes. Final gather will make everything cleaner, but there's not much happening here. So all good. This is more prep work for later. And then lumen reflections, this one here is definitely going to have the biggest impact, which it doesn't do now. Here we can see it just fills in a bit more of the actual with the screen space reflections. Now it's kind of like, you know, it just really depends. We can try and set this one but it doesn't really, like, change much. That's right. I think it's kind of, like, good enough. So here you can see, like, this is the first kind of way we can light this. We can do this. And, I mean, we can and this is, like, super simple again, right? Like, now we just only have like this one skylight. And additionally, we have a rather small but intense rectangular light trying to, like, click this here. So yeah, this is the first step to make this work. In the next video, we will look at how we just, like, tweak this a bit, adjust it, and how we can make some nice variations or play around a little bit more creatively. So thanks for watching and see you in the next lesson. 9. Rendering Prop Assets Part3: Hello, and welcome to the next session where we we'll improve this a little bit more, tweak some settings, and then also make a little variation for this one. So one thing that I just wanted to note here, when we look at this, there is obviously a bit of a problem with the lumen reflections. And one way that we can fix this, which is totally valid for portfolio purpose, obviously, is by just switching this here to standalone rate tracing. And you can see now This slaps quite good, I would say, especially when we decide to, like, render this out. So for now, let's just say we do that. But then I want to look at a few, like, more basic settings. One thing that I really, really hate A. Is the unreal integrated lens flare feature. I guess. Yeah, it's not bright enough to give us any, but I really, really urge anyone to, like, please don't use it because it actually makes your stuff look cheap because it is just a very ****** looking lens flare. If you want to do lens flares, like build custom lens flares with particle systems and things like that, that looks good. But don't really use this stuff. There can be a way to make it not look super bad and we'll potentially go into that when we do the exterior. But just, you know, don't do that. It makes your stuff look cheap. However, what is actually quite cool is here in the bloom settings, and this is the standard bloom and right now we may not see a lot from this, but I will show you just instances where it will make quite a bit of a difference. So what we should always do here is change to convolution. You saw a little bit of the whole image just changed. Like, that's fine. If I go to my rectangular light here and let's just say our default is like 75. Let's try something extreme. I'm just trying to illustrate a point here. Try to get some highlight somewhere. But it doesn't really want to do it. Well, I guess we need to do that in a later part because when we switch the bloom to convolution, we actually get a proper shape for our bloom. If we would get a highlight here, it would not be just this blurry blob, but it would actually be something that looks more like this here, which adds really, really nice, like, highlights. I do that when I have, emissive limes, for example, I crank them, so it triggers the bloom and you get like this nice little thing. It does look a lot more professional and cinematic. But this is, like, even without using this, the bloom like this is just more more pleasing to the eye. So if you can always use the convolution bloom, then our exposure is okay for now. So I know many people don't like post processing effects all that much. I I do like them when there is a purpose of, like, simulating a camera. Like, if you say, like, Okay, I need the most sterile and super crisp render, like ever, fine, like you do you. That's, of course, like, you know, everybody has, like, their own perception of things. But I personally, I do like adding in these things in a very, very subtle way. It's very funny because I do make, like, music in my free time, and I always describe it like in a similar way because, like, sometimes you can do an effect on your music, and you push it really hard, and then it's like overbearing, and that's not how you want the effect to be. But then, you basically reduce the effect so you don't notice it anymore. Then you bring it back up until you notice it a tiny little bit, and from that point on, you just, like, reduce it a super small little thing. And that is actually the sweet spot of where the effect works the best. I kind of feel in a very similar way about things like chromatic aberration and stuff like that, because I really do like it, but the problem is, I believe it has a very bad reputation because it's done the wrong way. And that is kind of like, for example, a lot of people don't like motion blur in video games. And the actual problem in my like I love motion blur, and I think it's very important for, like, cinematics. But what I think with the problem is, there's a difference between camera motion blur and per object motion blur. Per object motion blurr is like when the camera stays static and something moves quickly, it gets a bit of motion blur. I strongly believe that people wouldn't care about that at all, and they only care about it because there's also camera motion blur, which means that the camera moves and stuff gets blurry from camera movement. So they say, like, it makes them sick when they look at it. I don't believe that people would have the same problem if there was only per object motion blur. They might not even notice that it was there, but what they do notice is the camera blur, which is, well, not that great. So anyways, like, if we do this, so this was obviously quite a strong tweak here. So we can see it here in the back of the weapon. We can clearly see how it starts happening. And what we need to do is we need to make sure that our image, like here, we can also see it quite well. And actually, it does add to the believability because it is something that happens with cameras. But people also go like, it makes the image so blurry. So we need to find a way now to have this without it being overdone. And I do believe that if I would show you this picture like this, you wouldn't even notice that there was chromatic aberration. However, it adds to the flavor. Then dirt mask I usually don't really do but I am a big fan of vineyard, and to be honest, I almost always use the same vigard which is 0.6. I just, like, I don't know. I just, like, always kind of go with 0.6. It works for me. Now something very interesting. If we go down here to the color grading section, we have the filmic section, and this is the tone mapper. This is what does the conversion from the HDR rendering that happens in the background to the SDR view space we have here on our screen. I would recommend highly for the uninitiated to not really touch these values, like, read up a bit on what tone mapping does, how it works, and, like, fiddle around with it. Feel free to do so. But generally speaking, you don't really need to touch these unless you know exactly what you're doing and why you're doing it. I've seen it a lot from, like, less experienced people, is they just, like, randomly go in and they tweak, like all these things, and they go like, Oh, no, I just, like, worked this. Let's do something very important on our camera. And let's just go to transform and lock actor movement. So it stays like this. So, like, a lot of people, they just, like, randomly tweak things here because are looking for, like, this one thing that makes it just somewhat better. I'm a very strong, like, opponent of that. I don't think you should do that. I mean, you can try out things. Obviously, you need to, like, learn. But, if you don't know why it looks bad, like, touching these things here doesn't really help you to make it look any better. However, now we're just adding flavor. And flavor is a different thing. And one of the things that I do like the most is this thing down here in the filmic section. And this is basically clamping the highlights. And together with the chromatic aberration and some very subtle and tasteful grain, it adds this last like ten to 5% to an image that makes it just feel like this could have been taken with, like, a real camera. And what I do is I just crank it up to one and pretty much everything that I do. And now you can see that so this is going to be very hard to see, and I hope that the compression will do this justice. So look at this reflection here. So now this reflection is actually pure white. And look at this point here when I turn this off. On off. It's also very visible here. Like, now it's off on off on. So it sort of, like, takes the brightest values and clips them to full white. And this is something that happens with cameras. So to me, it's you know, it's about like we do many, many super tiny little things. And when they come together, they create an image that is so much more believable. But I think that a lot of people have this experience of, like, over tweaking all of these things, like, you know, too much chromatic aberration, too much blur here, too much stuff there. But it it's the sum of the parts that makes it a greater thing. And sadly, there's not really a switch I can flip to turn this on and off to basically show the global changes of what we did right now without turning off, like all the other things here, too. But, well, we could separate it into a different post process volume. But for now, it is really like it's about these subtleties coming together, and again, less is more. So we don't want to overdo this. One thing that I personally constantly end up overdoing, and that is because I just really love it so much is film grain. I'm a huge sucker for film grain. However, film grain can be a bit of a beast to tame. Luckily, very, very, luckily, they really made an incredible new film grain function here for On Reel five. It's just beautiful to have all these tweaks. So what I usually do is, I over tweak it in the Viewport, and then I start taking screenshots, and then I look how it looks on the screenshots. Because the thing is, the film grain is moving. So when we actually render out screenshots, it looks different than what it looked on the editor when, you know, moving as like, it was a game or something. So tweaking the film grain is a bit tricky. Because it also not only depends, like, there's a difference between, like, the rendered out image because of the film grain basically freezing in that moment. But also, I'm not sure if unreal or Epic has fixed that. But when we do a high resolution screenshot, there's actually a there's a multiplier being applied, and it used to be the case that the multiplier was not applied to the grain. So basically, when you set the grain size a certain way, and then you have a multiplier of two for the high resolution screenshot, your grain looked actually like two times smaller. So you had to make it two times larger to end up in the screenshot the way you wanted it to be. I haven't debugged this yet with OnRelF, so I'm not sure if it still works like that. However, what we want to do is we just want to, like, crank this for now, and hopefully you can see it. And what we want is this really nice, subtle stuff back there. So I'm going to make it a bit more intense so we can see it better right now. So very intense. That's obviously not what we want. So one thing that I like is I do like my film grain a tiny little bit bigger. And then we're going to soften it. And what I really also do like is when the film grain is stronger in, like, darker areas and less strong in, like, highlights and medium areas. So what we can do here is control the intensities for the mid tones. So first of all, we can excuse me, remove it from the highlights. And now you can see, I'm basically removing it from all the mid values, which is not what we want, but we want it to be quite strong here in these darker values. And by the way, this jiggling stuff here, that's just like traced reflection noise. So let's not confuse that with film grain. So this looks kind of weird because we do have quite some strong noise here and like none over here. So what we need to do now is we need to very carefully bring this back in. And now that we have this, Now that we have this, we should do a test shot. So the way I render out stuff is always with the high resolution screenshot if it's not a cinematic. And I usually do two times multiplier. That is usually enough for me. So let's do that. And let's have a look here, and here we go. So now you can see that the grain is indeed way too strong. However, what we can do is we can, debug the grain better because we see it this way. So I do like this quite a lot, and honestly, this does look like a proper picture taken with a camera. So this does look really believable. Like, this does not necessarily look like an unreal render. So this is actually one of the goals that I usually set myself for doing stuff. Like, I just don't I don't want my stuff to look like an unreal render. However, you may say that this is just too much, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. So what we're going to do is, which is going to go in here and say one, and we're going to capture another one. And we'll have a look here. So now we're actually starting to get into the realm of This is really pleasing. So, honestly, personally, I think this looks fantastic. I think this looks really, really good. Now imagine we put some logo stuff on here, like, some other things. Like, I mean, this is this looks pretty much photo real in a very pleasing way. And if you would want to, like, you know, get some different stuff with the depth of field and all these things, like, again, it's just about repositioning the camera, tweaking things. So like, absolutely no magic here. And this was, like, all super simple. Like, again, this was, like, not really super hard to do this. And what we actually, I'm going to take another light now. And what we can do super easily is, of course, for example, bring in another light source here. And this time, we're going to make this super soft. So we're going to keep this size for now. I'm going to turn this around here. And as you can see, we are, of course, getting some of the reflections here. And we can light this in so many different ways. So I will do something like this. And, it doesn't really matter where that thing is in the world. It only matters what happens in the shot. And now you could, for example, just like, play around with some stuff, like crazy colors. And what would be really interesting now would be to lift this so we can sort of, like, remove the reflection a little bit. But if I make this larger, like, you'll see how we're adding flavor to this. Like, you'll see how it's still there doing stuff. And this is like a super cool way to, like, give, like, mood to these kind of kind of things here. Just by adding cool little things like this. And if we move it far enough away, we should be able to really get rid of the reflection like this. But if I make it bright enough, we still start to get some cool, like, highlights here. So if you see that again, there are some really cool little highlights now. And it's all about just, like, placing it properly and making the shot work. And this is, like, really the simplest way of doing something really cool here. And it's not It's not magic at all. And also, we're still using the funky little house thing. So this is just, like, out of the box. And just rotation and some good tweaking here. I think we should maybe turn on the rate raised shadows for this one, too, just to make sure. So if we just going to take our high resolution screenshot and just, like, take this and we capture there's some really cool stuff that we can do here, definitely. I mean, we could probably just flip this over and have this come from the back because it would align more with this overall brightness. So this is also something to just, like, consider, generally speaking, that when you have a certain direction of something that is kind of like working, it might make sense to work with that and try to enhance it. So I'm just trying to do Oh, it is a bit tricky because of the way that it's just, like, so bright. But something like this. And now I need to I'm rotating it here, and I'm just looking at it off screen because I didn't want to, like, resize the viewport again because I kind of like wanted it to stay the same size for now. So we have the screenshots that we do at the same sort of like I think this is quite interesting, for example. So if we look at this. So there's a lot of really cool stuff that we can do to make this just look super neat. And then of course, the next thing that can be done is to take the camera unlock it. And with Adrag, just copy it. This one gets instantly locked again so we don't mess it up. I will clear out the rotation here and then pilot this thing. There's such cool stuff that we can do with this. I mean, like, even just, like, like reframing, like, just like that. It's kind of, like, so cool. And then we'll just use this guy again here. There's just so much we can do once we have this setup in place, and it's like the sky is your limit, can move it around so much, change the lighting setup. We can completely swap the cube map. It doesn't really matter. So yeah, that is, like, one of the easiest ways to then just, like, work with the setup that you have and just enhance it. And of course, we haven't even done any color grading because it's also not always necessary to do that. But of course, you can go into some of these values and, you know, move it a bit like this. Gives you totally different flare, instantly. So there's a lot of opportunity and option to do really cool things. And, of course, it all depends on how you just, like, make this work, set this up. This looks so good. But this is, like, classic, like, now that I offset the color grading a bit towards, like, the green teals like the classic Hollywood look that they all go for. But even when you have something like this, you know, do some cool close up shots of the thing that you're actually, trying to show here. Like, this is nice. Like, this is a really nice close up shot because we're catching these highlights here. Like, I need to render this out. This is like, even for me, it's like, exciting. It's so much fun to do these things because, like, you always, like, find something new and interesting to look at, and then you think, like, Dim, This is some really good stuff here. So like, this is this is a really good shot. Like, you can put this in your portfolio. And honestly, the best thing about this is these assets, they don't like, they're not banned, but they're not even that spectacular. So imagine if you're a really good weapon artist and you can put stuff out like this. This is just like this will get you hired, definitely. So yeah, that's it with this session. See you in the next lesson with some different things to light, but still sort of like similar purpose and approach. I hope you all had fun. Thanks for watching and see you in the next lesson. 10. Rendering Prop Assets Part4: Hello and welcome to the next session in our little presentation scene setup. So one thing that I also wanted to cover is just really how flexible a scene setup like this is for all kinds of different purposes. And I know that some people also would like to have these presentations in a bit more like a neutral way, so to speak. So this is actually very easily achievable when let's say we just take this. And by just doing a few little tweaks, we can completely change this into something different. So let's just remove the offset here that gets the green stuff. Then let's also turn off our orange light. So now we have a lot more neutral than before. And now what we're going to do is actually, we're just going to go in here and we change the colors, the metal ness, and all these kind of things. So if we do this, and then this we basically have a flat white background, and we can even if we make the highest and the lowest, like just the same color, like, let's do 0.6 and 0.6. We completely remove the scratches and we still do get a little bit of a highlight. So now, looking at this, we can see that we've completely altered how this feels. We can of course, I'm going to remove this over here. We can, of course, also just go in and that was the wrong one and frame it differently to our liking that maybe fits better with just this arrangement here. We'll add another one of this and we are going to pilot it. And where are we? There we go. So one thing that we can do here is just make sure that we really have, like this. And then we just position this nicely, make sure that we are completely straight here. And for the sake of this little project, I'm just going to, like, hide this one, go back to my camera. And just dial this in here. I I'm going to go back in and I'll work on my focus settings here to make sure that we're like, really good like this. So now we have a pretty flat presentation like this. But what if you say, like, Hey, I don't want this harsh shadow or I don't want the shadow like this at all. And that is absolutely no problem. I mean, first, if we wanted to solve the shadow itself here, we are here on, which is good. So we can just, like, change the size of the light to, like, really feather out this shadow in a way that we like, like this, for example. So that is one way to do it. However, a completely different way of making this, like, a lot more versatile and you may notice that I have the little grid pattern here again. I did not apply the console command right now because when we're actually here when it's like direct lit as well, not just skylight, it disappears. So I just don't really bother too much right now. But one thing that we can do that I really like, actually, is we can use the exponential height fog as a tool to create almost like, let's say, a fake atmosphere. So you can see now I just brought it in and I just, like, set the color to white. And we can then just, like, really crank the density like this. And you can already see that not only are we creating this kind of background here, But we're also, like, blending the distance. So we kind of, like, make the transition between the floor and what was the black background. We're like, blurring it, sort of. So one thing, let's try if that still works is we can actually crank the brightness of this by adding to the value above one. Yeah. So if we do two, we are now in an HDR value that is larger. So now what we can do is we can just, like, grab our weapon here, bring it. Actually, let's do it as a copy. So we can just, like, bring this guy up here, and then we're going to clear out the rotations. And which is going to, like, drag it up even further, kind of like this. And now what we have here is completely just the skylight HDR that we had. And let's bring this guy up here. Let's do something where we have it a bit more from this perspective. So first, we got to, of course, refocus here. And I would say that the important part is sort of this, but we also don't want the others to be too blurry. So let's go with 3.6 here, and it just gets, like, a bit less blurry. So now we can see that the highlights are not really that nice. So because every move that we make here with the lighting has two reasons. Reason number one, it should look cool. Reason number two, even more important is every decision we make here to light this should help put an emphasis on either the material definition or the shape of the object. And right now, it is not doing a very good job at this. Like, right now, we don't actually get like the sexy surface definition. And this is really interesting because when I look at, like, renderings like this that are not that great yet or haven't reached their full potential. And it basically makes the object look dull. What I later find out it's not really the object that looks bad or like the textures. It's really just it is not lit in the most beneficial way that enhances all the stuff that's already there. So the first thing that we can do is when you see it, and start slowly rotating. And Wow. Now we're going to start getting all this detail here, because now, like, we have a light that sort of hits in a diagonal angle. So if I, um if I just go into my snipping tool here and if I snip this. So the light is basically coming here from the side and hits this like this. So what this means it creates what we call a grazing angle. And it's the same as imagine you're outside. It is late afternoon sun, and when you look away from the sun, nothing catches specular highlights and it looks quite boring and dull. But when you turn around and you look towards the sun, then what happens is that, like, this is the ground, and you're like, looking into this direction, and like the sun is, like, sort of hitting like this, and then it creates all the nice interaction here. And we have the same with the gun because, like, if this is our gun, then we basically have the light hitting from, like, an angle like this, and it creates all the nice specular highlights here. So we're really always sort of trying to do exactly that, like, trying to find the best here boom. There we go. And now it goes away, and that's fine. So there's different settings that can work. So now, for example, you can see, we have a lot of volume, so to speak, on the handle here. But we do have less up here. And here this is where like, where two things come into play. So either we basically say, like, Hey, we want to do it like this, and then we're going to actually add a manual light that fixes the other issue. So we start again, lighting this properly. However, we could also potentially use a way better HDR image. And this is the moment where we're going to start trying some of the more crazy HDRs that I have collected over the years, which are like these kind of things here. And so these can make a super crazy difference. So if we just put this in here, and we can already see, I'm going to exaggerate this now. But you'll be able to see that there's, like, a lot of different highlights and colors cycling over the objects. So let's just see what cool stuff we can bring in here and what we are getting I want to quickly turn off the fog here. So this actually makes it crisper. And you can see how this, starts reading really well. And we can really, like, just go in and sculpt this look. I do like it quite a bit with the top light, but maybe we have some more with a strong top light here. Let's try this one. Yeah, so you can see here, we have a super strong top light. Here we get, like, the sides again. I think I kind of prefer this. And this is, again, this is just, like, taste. So you can clearly see, like this super easily makes it possible to have, like, a more neutral render like this. And there's all sorts of things we can do. And based on our camera perspective, like, it doesn't really matter where, like, the surfaces here are. Even if we wanted to do, like so, like, as soon as long as we're up here, we obviously get, like, the white background, but if you want to do, something like this, that is actually not a problem at all, because what we can do is, like, be super cheesy and just, like, duplicate the floor somewhere over here. And oh, yeah, this is the one that has the problem where we need to, like, actually flip it by 180. And we can also see So now what we would need to do to make this work properly while we're inside of the cinematic camera actor here, you can obviously see that this is not really like having the color that we want for obvious reasons. So there's multiple solutions to this, and they're all rather simple which is, like, the first thing that we can do is we can just, like, take this shader and decouple it sort of from the lighting and make it, like, unlit and, like, emissive of one. So it doesn't actually cast, like, a lot of light, but it's just, like, sort of visible. Or we can do the same thing with a sky sphere in the background, that is, like, really big and just has, like, a white background, so to speak. So there's a lot of different solutions to this, and they're all rather straightforward. We can also obviously just bring back the fog, and it is solved in a different way. And then we can, like, see here how we would like to have this. So, again, I might not be the best gun rendering guy around here. But this is, this is more about, all the concepts of how you can do things. And I think this looks really nice. So you can get some really clean and just good looking images here with all these different types of cube maps in one way or another. So this is kind of cool too. Let me get some color. And this would probably be cooler without the fog and the floor. I have a bunch of these with, like, a little bit of color. I'm not getting much here. But, like, still, you can see that also, like, just on full black. This just, like, does look quite sexy here. So there's sort of like infinite possibilities to tweak this in a way that you like or looks good or feels good. And yeah, again, just like always go for material definition. I feel that's the best thing you can do. And one fun thing to know is, if you want some gradients in the background, what can actually do is you can start cutting off the fog. So I'm not sure. Does this actually go more? No. No more than two. However, we can bring it down physically in the world because it's a height fog. So now you can see we're moving it down. So we're creating a sort of like gradient here in the background. Which can be cool depending on what you want to do. This weapon is just so long. So, if you take this, for example, and then just reframe this fix this. And let's see if we can find a bit of a better hit here. Yeah. So if we take this. Yeah, I think that works pretty well. So yeah, this is how we do it. And in the next lesson, we go to do exactly the same, but a bit different because we're going to do a vehicle. So I hope we had some fun and thanks for watching. See you in the next lesson. 11. Rendering Vehicle Assets: Hello and welcome to the next session in our series for prop lighting and just generally, like, presentation scenes. So, as we've been going through a lot of topics already, like, step by step, I want to introduce a few more little things that can be helpful or that I just feel like they're important to know. They don't like, always absolutely need to be used. So always carefully consider if you actually need something, if it makes a big difference. So far, we have been really good with the way that we've been doing things. But again, step by step, I just want to introduce everyone to also a little bit more flexibility and options that we actually have. And before I'm going to use the vehicle that we will be lighting, let's have a look at this chrome ball. And also, if you look at my scene setup here, it's basically the same scene as when we started with the weapon, but I just removed almost everything else. It's the same basic material on the floor again. I removed a bunch of the more custom tweaks here, so no vineyard, no grain, no, like, color grading. So we're basically back to the default that we had. So now, one interesting thing when we look at the skylight here, When it comes to skylight reflections, the first thing to note is that when we go to the post process volume, I'm going to zoom in here a little bit. In the post process volume, we do actually have a lot of control over what type of techniques we want to use in terms of rendering techniques. And right now, we can see that our project default is lumen for global illumination, and it's also lumen for reflections. So here's a thing though. There can be instances where it makes sense to switch these like we did, for example, with the rate raised reflections, but also in global illumination, there can be scenarios where you maybe want to have a lot more control over certain things and you actually don't necessarily want to use lumen. So it is always important to sort of figure out the needs that you have, and then sometimes it can be better to switch these. And one important thing that I just want to show is, if we look at these reflections here, this is the reflection from our cube map. But also, it actually does look really, really clean and high resolution. If I switch this to non, you can see that there's a lot of more pixelation going on here, and that comes from the skylights resolution, which we have here. Even though my texture itself is an eight K texture, that is not automatically what the skylight uses. And depending on the types of materials that you have in your scene, you may want to increase the cube map resolution to get a more detailed result. It does have its limits, as far as I know or can tell, it doesn't really go above one K. So that is something to keep in mind. So if you look at these pixels here that we can see or here this edge, if I go and set 1024, you can see it does look softer. Like, it does look more, well, let's call it interpolated. But what you can also see is, like, it doesn't really go fully away. And something that I found to be quite fascinating is that if you look at this, of course, there's still, something that we could call, like artifacts. But if we switch to the reflection method lumen, look what happens. Like, now this becomes so much more crisp. It's almost like we would use, like, maybe not like an eight K, but like a four K image. So Lumen already does something in the background that increases the quality of these reflections from the texture. I honestly don't know the technical aspects of this because, like, I am very experienced with Unreal, but then again, we always have to remember Unreal five is still fairly new. Lumen is still heavily in progress. There are a lot of things that we don't yet fully know how exactly they work. They haven't been fully explored. And also there haven't been, full well, let's say, technical breakdowns on how some of these features are actually implemented. And if we look at this edge here, and I go back to 128, I got a little bit more like zig zagy same as here, but you can see the jump 128-1024 is by no means as big as it was before. So what this means is that we can really go with this, like, lower resolution, and it doesn't really mean a lot to us because, like, compared to, like, not using Lumen, this is already so much better. A second thing that you might notice is, like, we're not actually getting the reflection from the ground here, but we're getting instead this black stuff. And now we do get some screen space reflection from, like, our floor. But, again, generally speaking, this thing here is black. So you may be wondering why this is, I did not bother too much before. And the reason because I didn't bother too much was we had our weapon on the floor, and I had traced reflections on, which means that a lot of the stuff that was like we called this the bottom hemisphere, and this is the top hemisphere. If you divide the sphere in like two sides up and down. On the bottom hemisphere, a lot of it was filled in very accurately with traced reflections. It would have been something that we could have looked at when we did the weapon that was like floating in mid air. But generally speaking, it was quite good for we needed it to be however, the more we advance with what we're going to do, we may want to receive that information, which is the bottom here, for example, to actually be represented not only in the reflections, but also in the lighting, because imagine if we would have an asset that would be this chair and we wanted to look like it was placed in this room, we kind of do not only want to get the reflection, but we want to get the global illumination brown bounce light from the bottom to make it feel like it's really part of that scene. And per default, the skylighting kills everything that is in the bottom hemisphere because it is designed to mimic skylighting and the localized lighting and reflection comes in from what we see in the environment itself. However, we don't really do that because we're having this very isolated presentation scene here. So in that instance, it becomes something entirely different for what we want to do. And to fix that, we need to select our skylight here, open the Advanced tab, and then you can see that lower hemisphere is solid color. And this is quite cool, but by default, like, the color is obviously just black. The cool thing is we can change this to kind of, like, whatever we want. And we're going to, like, get some stuff here. However, it is not really needed here, but what we actually want is we want to turn this off. And now something very interesting is happening that I myself had not yet discovered, and it might be because of Lumen. So let's have a quick look. I think it's really fascinating to discover these things because, again, with Lumen, a lot of it has changed. So here you can see that if I switch the reflections from Lumen, now we actually get the full bottom. So if we go back into our skylight, and we turn it back on. You can see here is the lower hemisphere. And again, we can change the colors to something, whatever. This has been used a lot in Unreal four for creating, like, fake bounce light when using dynamic lighting. So like, you basically when you have an exterior scene, and let's say it's like a desert or something, and then the upper part captures the actual sky, and then the lower part usually is black, which is not what should happen because you have the desert floor or ground. And then you can just kind of, like, you know, go with, like, a desert sort of color to fake the bounce from the bottom. That has been a very common technique, and this is what you would want to use when you just, like, place your object as is into, like, an environment scene like this. This is also what you get when you use Marmoset, for example, you just really get the full effects of the cube map. And to be really honest, I don't know why it doesn't do that anymore when you turn on lumen. Like, I really don't know why it just kills it off and makes it completely black. That is very interesting. And I don't think. Oh, wow, it actually does the same when we do the ray tracing, as well. So this is something to just keep in mind. And this is also something where I think in the beginning of the video series here, I mentioned that there will be things that may not work as expected because of the nature of a lot of things just being still work in progress, not yet fully done, all these types of things. So it is really important that whatever you do, you kind of want to choose the thing that works the best for what you want to do. And it may be like a completely different combination here with all these different settings. So one of the best, like, tips I can give to everyone, just like going on their way with this is like, you know, try things out. Try how these settings work for you, how they combine, depending on what you want to do. I think this is always going to be like fine in the end. It's going to be like something nice. So, you know, mix and match how you feel because especially in these isolated scenarios like this, it's not as important that all these things make, like, physical or scientific sense. The only thing that actually really matters is, like, does it look kick *** or not? Because that's kind of what you want. That is, like, you want the best possible presentation that you can get and it is kind of like irrelevant what you do with these things here. Like, you can see screen space is kind of like working rather well in this case, because now we just have nothing. So yeah, with that out of the way, let's delete this chrome spear. And let's have a look for my vehicle. So what I did with the vehicle is I created a blueprint for myself that just has the static mesh in there because I did not need all the functionality and all that kind of stuff. And one thing that I did was I added a bunch of lights here. So you can see that there is point lights and spotlights. Now, you may think, like, Okay, so why is there both? And the thing is that if we look here, we can clearly see that this is like a light here from the headlights. So but this part of the material or the shader, it does not really support emissive. So if I have, like, a spotlight that goes like this. What will happen is it will look a bit weird because I will get the obvious light distribution. However, if I turn this off, you can see, like, I will create light towards the front, but it doesn't actually really look like this thing is glowing. And I did not have any control over that because, again, I don't have a shade or mask here where I can say, like, this is a missive. So I just added, like, tiny little point lights here, which is not super accurate, but just for the sake of what I like, it sort of gets the job done. I did the same over here. And one important thing that I also did, and I won't explain too much about this. Now, we'll actually look at this when we go into the environment scene because, like, you see this, like, huge yellow thing here, and you may be wondering, like, Oh, what is this? So what I'm doing here is I'm using an IES profile. And an IES profile is basically, if you look at this here, you can see this looks kind of like someone took a picture of, like, a lamp or something that is illuminating a wall. So every light bulb that is available for buying in one way or another, like, you know, it can be going to the store and buying a light bulb. It can also just be going for industrial purposes, you know, like ordering a replacement thing for car headlights, whatever. They all have a sort of flavor of how the lamp actually spreads the light across space or, like, you know, how it, sort of like a pattern of spread, how the light behaves. And this can be mapped out into, like, a graph representing the distribution of the light. And that file basically is what we call an IES profile, and it describes how the light spreads. So this is very common. And like a lot of manufacturers, they actually give you their IES profiles of their lamps, so you can emulate it. And it is very common in architectural rendering and just stuff like that. And the more you want to go like realistic with your lighting, it is highly recommended to sort of like use IES profiles. So here you can see what these kind of look like. So I guess you have seen this. Like, some of them have these really interesting shapes of how the light behaves. And, for example, if you look at this one here, the one on the right, you can see that here in the center part, it almost looks a little bit like when you have a flashlight and you point it at a wall. You can also see this like shape. So when it hits the wall sideways, this is kind of like a shape that it creates. And these profiles, they are very often used for architecture, as you can see. And even if it sometimes doesn't necessarily look like it because it can be very faint, almost every light has something like that. So it just makes it feel a little bit more realistic. And I chose to use an IAS profile here, which is this one. So that is just something so you know what this is. But again, we will use this more when we work with the other environment where we actually going to well, use them on our light sources. So let me just close this down here. So let's drag this in. So here you can see this is our vehicle standing on the ground nicely. And here you can see that this is the way our headlights hit right now. We do have our lights back here, too. So now we can see that this is just out of the box how this feels like, how this renders with the same thing as we had before. We do get some nice, like, contact shadowing here. It's all pretty pretty good. However, I'm not fully convinced that this is the perfect HDR for rendering this object. Because if you remember, what I think is the most important is that we really make the material parameters like pop. And, of course, like, we can again, right? We can just decide to, like, rotate this, see what happens. But then again, one thing that I kind of like don't want to do with this one here right now is, like, this is way too too warm for my taste. So I think I want something that has some proper highlights in it so we can get the material to read, but I also want it rather well, let's say neutral. So if I go into my lighting folder here and drag this out of the way, I'm like, opening the HDR files that I have here. They're rather large, so it can take a little bit of time sometimes so that you get loaded well. So here we have these two studios, and they are the same studio, but, like, differently lit. And I think I would like to have this one. It just has more general light. And this one just has, like, these, like, hot spots, but, like, it's rather dark. So let's see. Let's start with this one. And let's put it into the skylight. Also, I'm going to put this back to one for now. And again, before I go into tweaking this like crazy, I want to bring in all the elements that I feel like I need for this. I want to decide on, like an angle that I like, and then I want to, like, work around the setup, sort of. So the next thing that I'm going to bring in is my camera. And I'm gonna pilot it, see where am I? Here I am. Cool. So now, what I'm going to do again is I'm going to go to DSLR. I will go with a 50 millimeter at this time. Don't want it to be too flat. Kind of like this. Then what I also want for this camera is I don't want depth of field that much. So I'm going to go with a 5.6. But still, I will also make sure that I am kind of, like, focused more or less on my object here. So I think this is pretty good. All right. And now, what I also want to do is now I want to really lean in with, like, the atmosphere to get a proper space. And I also want that my light sources here. I really want to get that sort of like volumetric effect. I think that would be really cool. So we're going to go into our exponential height fog here, bring this guy in. And let's just hit volumetric fog. So now we can already see that we got something here. So we're going to get some scattering and all that. But we still don't really have anything that blends the foreground and the background. So for that to happen, we do need to sort of increase this guy here, right? We do need to create more density. So let's do 0.1. And to 0.5. So now this is obviously, completely bonkers. And we can also see it affects the volumetric too. So now we need to sort of carefully balance that out. And the first thing that we can do is we can start looking if it actually helps us to get this back and it doesn't really do much because we crank this, like so much now that we're getting it will affect our volumetrics here a lot. So let's do this. And let's go with our scattering color first. So this is always important to understand because like, all these things, some of them they work in tandem and some of them work isolated. So if we have a black in scattering color, we obviously need a lot of fog density to actually reach something. But if we increase this density up here, it will have a very strong effect on the volumetric fog, even though the volumetric fogs density is theoretically defined by the extinction scale. So it is a little bit, tricky sometimes to balance these out, but it can still work quite well here. So now what we can do with the floor is let's see if we make it bigger, it might actually start, like, bleeding into where we want it to be. Still not that much. Let's start without the volumetric fog, and let's try to just get something that we really like here. We don't need this. So this is sort of like starting to, like, be what we kind of, like, want to have. However, we need to make this, like, a lot more subtle. So let's do this. And now we're going to do kind of like this. And it seems that we can shift it a bit towards blue, so like this. So now we kind of, like, created this soft transition, okay? And we can actually let's try like this. I brought it back a little so we actually have a softer transition into the background. And now let's see how much it blows around when we do this. So this is very interesting now because now what we do we basically will fix this via the extinction scale. So if we do this, we can see that we get, like, a lot more control over this. So we do have a very thick fog to, like, blend this. We push it back so we don't actually over fog this area, and then we decouple the volumetric effect from the overall density that we have up here. And now we get a lot more like cleanness and crispness in our image while still getting the scattering. And if you were to reduce this even more, like, let's say, 0.01, or let's do 0.02. So if you say, like, I really like this look, but now my lights, they just don't scatter as much anymore. That is something that is super easy to fix by just going in our blueprint. And if we look at this and Oops, did I press the correct one? Why can I not so it's this one and this one. Alright. So if we look in our settings here, we have a vollometric scattering intensity, which set to 1.5 now. So if I just try to move this to the side a little bit here, So if you say, this is the look I want, you just go into your volumetric scattering intensity and say, let's do five, for example, or let's do ten. So now you kind of have the best of both worlds. So you do have the more muted, less vollometric background, but you still get this really nice, m from the volumetric effect here. The same kind of goes for the bag where we can just go in and take this guy. And this guy here, and you can see I already have a lot of volumetric scattering intensity when I go here. Excuse me, I had it on the other screen. So just take the back lights here. You can see I already crank this a lot. And the reason for that is because these are actually not super bright. So if we look at those ones instead, you can see there's a different story here because these are the bright ones and they don't have a lot of scattering intensity. So if I just pull this over here, and do like ten. You can see now it creates this, like, nice little thing here. So if we look at this, this already looks like really cool and really, really nice. So now we have a setup, but we don't actually have anything done with our skylight here. So we may want to just really go in here and find a spot where we feel like, Oh, yeah, this is like hitting well. And, again, we always want to kind of, like, have some good material definition here. Now, what I can see is that I'm not fully happy with what I'm getting from this setup here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to try the studio that is a bit darker and see where I can get something with this one. This is not too bad. But again, let's be a bit, like, you know, it's always about experimenting. There's never really, like this one way of, like, Yep, this is it. Never need to touch it again. It's always worth to check a few and just really really see what you kind of like. So we don't know yet what we like. Yeah, this is almost too soft for me. Wow. And this is very, very bright. Okay. So let's just say this is what we like. Now we need to enhance it. We can't just get away with just the HDR. So we will need to place a bunch of lights here. And if you remember, always, less is more in my opinion. So we should try to not like, overdo it too much. I will go out of the camera, and I do have it like here. So let's just make this small, put it kind of like here. And I really like to usually use just area lights for this stuff. Kind of, like, in my opinion, works the best. And if you remember it as well, it's always like the grazing angles that produce the best sort of highlights. So if we just, like, take this. I always start a little bit more extreme than I maybe should. So let's just crank this because it's easy to dial it back once you have sort of the effect that you would want. So just like looking at this. And so this it's important that you also make this large enough here so you can sort of, like, see what you're doing. I will also turn on my ray trace shadows just so it's softer because on the bottom here, I don't want this super insanely visible shadow casting. This is something that I think is very important. But again, I want it to be in a way where I can say that the materials read well. So let's say maybe something like this. And now I'm going to actually duplicate this. I'm gonna reset these. And now what I kind of want to do is make sure that we catch a bit more like highlights also from the back here. But I need to move this a bit out of the way. And then I need to increase the radius. There we go. So now we start getting this readability of what the object kind of looks like. And I'm lifting it a bit more so it's not too much here. This is always the fine, delicate act of balancing, so you don't have too much light influence everywhere because you don't want that the floor looks like super splotchy, but it's just about, like, enhancing the readability on these objects. And again, like, just creating, like, better highlights. So if we jump into our camera here, So now we actually have some really nice readability of all the materials here. So I think this is starting to look really, really good. We can, position this a bit better. So maybe like this, so we cut off a bit more here. And now you can see this looks quite pleasing, and we have this, in a way that sells the object. And again, if we just say, like, we need another one, and then we can go in and try to find some really nice spots where we want to show something like highlighted, can pick something here, where it just really shows off some of the material definitions that we have obviously reteaking our settings here. And for this, it could actually be nice to, like, choose, like, a different aperture and then, like, make it, like, focus really well on something in the foreground, just like to, you know, get this, like nicer blur and depth of field going and maybe even switch to the lens so we get something like this. So we can do these really nice, close up shots or something. So you can see these read quite well here. Acid holds up quality wise quite well, too. So you can do these nice close up shots for stuff like this. And of course, here you could also do the same thing that we did with the weapons. Like if you say that, for example, you want a certain look or feel. You could just, like, I don't know, for example, let's say you just want to do this. And then we go out of this and we pin it. So now we can pin it because I don't have it on the other screen. And now you can say, like, Hey, I really want to add a certain highlight for this. That kind of, like, doesn't really make a lot of sense, but I just wanted to look a certain way. Then that's totally fine, too. And you may want to have it only in this specific shot. Widening this, turning on the ray trace shadows here. And then, you know, maybe, like, play with the colors a bit. Can do something cooler. Let's do the classic Hollywood lighting. You can't have this come in from the back here. And again, like, maybe not, like, the most beautiful thing, but generally speaking, it's more about the techniques here. You know, make it look like a bit warmer. So you can have, this stuff and then, sculpt it the way you want it to feel. So absolutely nothing wrong with that. And you can see if we go into this. It may not even be so bad. Like if we look at this here. So this is our light. Maybe you kind of want that. We can increase it a little bit. Actually, it doesn't look too bad to have this little highlight here if I increase this. You can see that obviously it starts affecting a lot, but if we just tastefully tweak it, and look at this. So you can add all these kind of, like, things where it doesn't really affect much else here. It just gives a little bit of, like, a hint of color to the object. So you can do all these sorts of things. But as you see, generally speaking, it is rather straightforward. To build a scene like this. And then, like, you know, just copy the cameras, jump around, try different setups with it. And yeah, you'll get something really, really nice. And yeah, we haven't done any postwk so far. That is also something that we can just bring in. Like, let's imagine we want to do this thing again, but maybe we want it to be more towards the blue. We can bring back our Oops. Our vignette to, like, frame it. And you can see there's a bunch of good things that we can bring back in. Of course, we can also do our film grain here. So all in all, it is rather straightforward, but again, also just be creative, try things out. And the techniques are often very much the same. You just need to adapt based on the context of your subject. So if we look at this, actually rendering out this one here, but I want to render out this guy. So now we got this here. Oh, okay. This is new. Usually, it bypasses the icons. So here we go. Like, you know, maybe a bit too much noise here in that sense. So we could dial down on the noise a bit. But overall, really simple setup yet again, because if we add too many of these lights, then we get too much highlight points, we get too much like shadows that, like, you know, go overlapping and it becomes really hard to tame it if you want to make changes. And what you can also do, of course, is you can like all these extra lights if you have them based on certain shots or something like that. You know, just like take them like these two, for example, and then group them into a folder and then name it the same names as you name the cameras. To keep your work also clean. So, you know, like when I'm in this camera, those are the lights that I want on. When I'm in that camera, those are the lights. Because one thing that is very important to understand also is not all the lights set up will always work for every perspective that you have for your given object. So it does make sense to alter the lighting based on the camera angle and the shot. Like, even, you know, if you have skylight, like, you know, it can have even different rotations of your cube map based on which angle of your camera you have, and then you can easily duplicate the skylights and just turn them on and off by hiding the folder contents and stuff like that. So yeah, this is how we can light a vehicle. I hope you found it interesting. And in the next session, we're going to look at some more outdoorsy things. So looking forward to that. Thanks for watching and see you in the next lesson. 12. Rendering Natural Assets: Hello, and welcome to the next session here. So this time, we're going to do something a little bit more different than what we had before. As you can see, we're still again, starting with the same scene because, you know, there's a bunch of things already here, so that is a nice thing. You can also, say something like this as a template. There's you know, many different ways of doing this, but it can be nice to have something in place where you have a post volume that is like tweet, you have your skylight, stuff like that. So before we jump into this, what we did in the past was usually looking at man made things. And I do like have these sort of studio environment setup things for man made objects. But when we look at nature, I don't necessarily like it as much. I think it's a little bit, like, too sterile. What I like to do is something that is a mix between a studio environment and something that is a little bit more realistic. So first, I'm just going to move over here so we don't interfere with the skylight all the time. So this time, I don't really have, like, trees or stuff like lying around right now. You can do this with any type of asset. It doesn't really matter. But for the sake of illustrating this, I just downloaded three rock assemblies from mega scan. I chose to use the Nanite version just because we can and, you know, what's bad with having more geometry to work with without it really increasing our cost. So the first thing that we're going to do is we're just going to build our little assembly. And let's say, you're an environment artist and you've been outside on a little scanning trip, right? You're like you build your beautifully scanned assets. Now you want to present them in a pleasing way. And the first thing that I like to do is not just like, you know, just like, add a rock here in the center and then, pull some lights and call it done. Now, what I like to do and what I also think is something that, for example, recruiters or other like, industry professionals, what they really appreciate is that when we build things, and that includes, like assets, textures, you name it. A lot of it comes down to, like, context in a certain way because when you build a game, there's never going to be like an empty room with one rock and you just, like, walk around the rock. I like, Oh, my God, this rock, it looks so good. Like, that's not what's going to happen unless you maybe build, like, a gallery, a museum space, and then there's, like, a rock being presented. But jokes aside, usually you look at all the assets and textures in context. So it helps to build a sort of, like, a little bit of, like, an assembly, if we may call it that because it feels more natural. So let's take this thing here, for example. So let's say that this is the rock that you have scanned, okay? Let's go into our buffer visionization and base color. So this is the rock that you made, and you want to show this rock off in the best possible way. It is great when you have these extended parts of the geometry, especially for, like, terrain blending and stuff like that. But if we just look at this, sort of like it's not really like that great. So first thing that I'm going to do, I will actually scale this up by two I will also turn off the snapping for scale. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull this guy down slightly. You can see the main object is here. There's a bunch of other stuff here. Here we're still hitting, here we're already cutting it off a little bit. But this is okay. If we look at this, it looks cool, but it also looks a little bit lost. Or the next thing that I want to do is I want to bring in some more of these assemblies that I have here of different little rocks to create a bit more variation and blend this a little bit, so to speak. Let's just see how much curvature we have here, but this is right. This one, I will probably just scale it down a little bit. And I'm going to rotate it kind of like this. And then I will actually rotate it without snapping tiny little bit like this. And I'm going to move it in so we can sort of, like, break up this edge that we have here a little bit. So it's not as uniform. And you can already see it starts to create more interesting silhouette and shape. And we're going to basically show this acid from this angle or from this angle because this is where the most interesting shapes are. We're not going to worry too much about this backside. It's the least interesting. So what we're going to do is we're going to, like, worry about this space here the most. And this is also one of the reasons why I chose nanite because due to it being nanite now, we have the most geometry. So we get these, like, little cutouts that are almost like there some small little stones that have been, like, scattered around here. I'm going to take this other assembly that I have here as well. And let's just see how I like it the most. So I don't want too much of the sand. Just kind of want to get this into something like this. And I'm going to duplicate this, bring it over here. Rotate it this way around. I'm gonna scale it up a little bit, and then just see what I like here. If I break this up or if it is too much, we'll see. So I think this works okay, I let's see if we can do some more here. Just like, you know, rotate the stuff around a little bit. I do like this more really want some small pebbles here. Let's scale this down and just for a little bit more breakup. Something like this. And we take this here and just do something like this. Okay. Now we obviously have a problem, and the problem is that these colors don't really match. So the first thing is for this one, it has pretty much the same color, but it is also too light. Luckily, there's a pretty simple fix that we can do because we do have these, like, texture adjustments here. And so one thing, when you create consistency, it's obviously really important when you work with your textures that you do most of it beforehand, right? Like, you don't want to go in and tweak all these things in engine. But this is actually a good tip for when you, for example, work with marketplace content and you need to, like, align things. It can help to use these. But when you're actually creating your own environment artwork, you kind of, don't want to touch these too much. You want to, like, pre balance all that stuff and like Photoshop or your tool of choice beforehand. However, let's do this here. Sorry, I think this one works the inverted way, as far as I remember, higher values created more dark. And I can see now it fits in really well with the other texture. So let's save this. Got to take a bit because an eight K texture, they export eight K textures when you use nanite obviously because you want as high of a resolution as you can. So let's close this guy. And here, we're going to do something different first because first, we're going to lower the saturation to 0.5. And now you can see this probably will fit a lot better, but we do need a lot more to darken it in that sense. So let's use the brightness curve again. And now I'm going to combine it with this overall brightness thing because the brightness curve can be tricky a bit. It also creates a bit more contrast. I think for now, this is actually good enough. This does not really stick out. And that is also the reason why I switched to base color mode, so I really see this, right? I'm going to save this one too. All right. We're done. Now if we go back to it, we do get some sweet like ambienocltion, stuff like that, but it's not really super there yet. So if I quickly and by the way, unlit and buffer visualization base color, they don't look exactly the same, which is why I'm using the base color. The first thing that I'm going to do is going to go into my floor instance here. And I will make it a bit brighter. So maybe like 0.1, something like this. Or maybe actually let's go with 0.075, like this. So now that I have this, so what did I mean when I said, initially, I want this to be more organic and more like fitting for nature? So for something like this, I personally would use, like, some kind of like sky system. So the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to add a sky atmosphere. And when I do that, like, pretty much nothing happens because the sky atmosphere is a simulation that needs a sunlight to actually work. Otherwise, it is not going to do anything because the sky atmosphere, it only reacts to the sun like it would happen in real life, too, that if we wouldn't have a sun, then it would just be like pitch black all the time, like what you have with, like, a nighttime sky. So it needs the sun to scatter through the atmosphere to actually create the look that we're used to during daytime. So let's do that. Go to lights, and let's drag an a directional light. And there we go. So now the first thing has happened. We have our sun, which I think per default is set to be an atmospherical light too, so we can double check that somewhere. Here, atmosphere sunlight. So we know this light source is triggering our atmosphere actor here. Zone. Now, what we also need is, of course, a camera. So we're going to go here, take our camera actor. We pilot this guy. And we'll take a look here. You can see just by adding the camera actor and doing all these things, we already see something that starts looking more or less nice. So if you want to do these asset presentations, I really urge you to do stuff like this because it just helps to make your work look good and present well. And the thing is, I did not necessarily add the sky actor so we can actually see it. I mostly add the sky actor because what we will do is, we will take our skylight here and we will switch it to captured scene. And now you saw that the lighting here changed completely. And that is because now we get blue fill light from the actual sky here, like basically like illuminating this. So we're not using this kind of fake cube map anymore, but now we're actually using the sky. And one thing that we can also see here is that our sun most likely is a bit too dark. So the first thing that we should do now before we continue any further is we should kind of decide like, what do we actually want with our sun here? I'm just trying to get the sun to be here in front of me. And now we need to figure out what is like the sort of sun rotation that shows the asset the best way. And we can, of course, like, go in here and change, like, the angle and stuff like that. And then, you know, the sky also does like update really well. So if you would like to have this moody thing, you could totally do something like this. And obviously in the post process volume, we would also need to look at our exposure now because it is very dark. And for simplicity reason, I don't touch these at all. Just go in here, and you can see we get something quite nice like this. So if you'd say, like, Hey, I want this really nice coast, like, look to it, that might actually be a nice way of having your shadows kind of like this if you would want to. So let's say we roll with this. One thing that we also need to do is on our camera actor here. Again, we need to of course, choose how do we want to look into the world here? So again, I'm going to change my sensor. I think I'm going to go with the 50 millimeter again. I don't want too much depth of field for this, so I'm going to go with 5.6. But still, got to bring this guy back here and say, like, this is where we need it, Chris. So now we obviously have a problem here, and that is that our ground mesh basically doesn't really go into the horizon. And you may have guessed it, but the way to fix this is, of course, getting our exponential height fog in here. And one important thing here is, I don't really use vlometric stuff for this kind of setting because we don't really have large scale shadow casters that would potentially create interesting good rays or something like this. So here, we're just going to completely ignore that. And we just, like, crank our fog again. We're going to change this to make this, like, brighter. Let's see where we go with the colors. And of course, we can do all sorts of things here. Like, now it feels more like a proper sky. We may need to adjust also to bloom. There's a lot of things that we can do. And again, I'm creating this blend here. And now I just need to soften it. And the important thing here is what you kind of want to do is you kind of want to make sure that you also match the colors. So here again, we want to, like, open our material for the floor, and we kind of want to make sure that we fit this nicely. So if we look at this, we just create this really nice mood that shows the asset in a very, very good way, very pleasing. And it's still sort of like an isolated setup when we look at this. But at the same time, it feels very natural because we do have natural light. We do have some sort of sky simulation going on. And imagine if you would have even more assets. You could just build a bigger assembly or you could even put some grass blades in here, which will really make this look very, very nice. So if I just at the same time here and on the side, let's let's just do this. So I'm just going to search for something here. Do we have some shrubs? Do we have some cool shrubs? Well, actually, I think that maybe some grass would fit better here. So one of my favorites is always the wild grass. It is really, really nice. So it just like, let's download this guy here. And this is really, again, this is just very, very simple and natural looking. So not really too much that you really need to do here, but it just, like, glues it together nicely, I think. You could do, like, a way darker scene, too. But I think, especially for acids like rocks and trees and other, like, outdoor stuff, I feel personally that it looks the best when you do have a sunlight and a proper sky. Also, one of the things that when you do plant, subsurface from the shader, it usually really looks the best with sunlight. It does look kind of okay with just, you know, like placing, like, point lines and stuff. But it's a bit different when it gets hit by proper sunlight because sunlight distributes a little bit differently than the local lights do. So that was rather quick. I'm actually not sure if it's already added. Let's see. Yeah, this looks fine. So here we go. So I'm just going to randomly drag some of those in here, and I have no idea if it's going to look good. The first thing that I will be doing is I will switch my external view port to this thing here. I'll bring it in. Like this, and I'm going to jump out of this here. And just for sake of even if you would do a perspective like this, it still is kind of like nice. You can build a proper assembly here. So you don't even have to be that close up. But I guess it also depends a bit on what you feel like, what you want. And this is obviously super small now because we scaled all this up. So let's see if we do this. I think we could go even a bit taller. So now we can just, like, put this nicely here, drag some of these in. I think I would like this to be more here. I have like some small ones. And you can see, just generally trying to make this feel a bit more alive because that is the thing, right? Like, these are like, nature objects. So you kind of just want to make sure that the stuff sort of feels alive. And that is the problem when we have a studio setup like what we did before. It does not really feel alive in that sense. So I think it really helps to do something like this. And let's just, like, have a look at this again. So, yeah, you can see how this, like, really, well, like, comes together. I mean, like, we could place some more grass here and there. It's like, kind of whatever we kind of want it to be. Like, create some depth here. Yeah. So like this, for example, this is something that I would consider a really beautiful presentation for your artwork. So when I see this, I see that, Okay, that person understands how to create a good object. But the person also at the same time understands how you can present some of that work in a way that really, like, sells the object, which I think is often very important, too, because, like, yeah, there's a there's always a quick and dirty way, but there's also a way that just makes things look like really nice. And personally, I think this should always sort of, like, go into these things as well for how you present it really, really well. Kind of need to look through here again to see is that too much. No, this is actually a nice edition here with the flower. So looking at this, this is a really nice and professional presentation for something that would be done like this. And then, of course, it is super easy to also just change the sun position again, for sure. We can come in here, duplicate this camera and pilot this guy, and then do something entirely different, like, create some cool stuff here. And again, like I said before, be creative. Now I'm going to choose a different aperture here. So I will get some nice depth of field. So looking at this, for example, right? There's a lot of ways on showing this. And then this is something that you would also want to do because you want to really show that asset that you created, right? You want us as the consumer to see the geometry and the detail that went into this. So these kind of, like, close up shots of some stuff, they can be really, really nice. Creating some almost macro like shots here. But I think this is a very good way of presenting stuff like this that feels pleasing to the eye and really is respectful of the work and skill that went into creating the content. So this is how I would go about doing this for objects like this. And as you can see, like, this could be anything. You know, This could really be anything. But again, also one of these like what I call pro tips is create these little assemblies, right? Like, even if you I don't know, like, go for, like, if we go with nature here, and we go with, like, tree stuff, right? Like, use a tree lock like this and then take a few of these, like, fallen branches, scatter them around there, scatter some leaves, and put them all in here. I think it's going to be stuff that looks really, really nice. And talking about plants, if we actually, let's do this here. If you look at these things, for example, that they have here, like, even, like, small little assemblies, of course, it's kind of like what they do here, right? Like, if you look at this, for example, like, of course, this is not the same thing here. But, if you look at this, imagine this with, like, this sort of, like, lighting setup. It just looks really nice. Let's try this quickly and see what we get. And this is also especially important, I think that nature is wild and beautiful and you kind of want to get that into your presentation. But at the same time, and that is, for example, the reason why I chose these kind of, like, bright colors for the background and all that kind of stuff. At the same time, you want it to be somewhat controlled, as well. You you want that it has the beauty of something wild, but you also want that it's readable. And if it gets too noisy, especially with, like, the backgrounds, for example, then it's not that readable anymore. So we do have our ferns here. So let's just like drag them in. So there's one thing, I don't really know. Yeah, this does not look that great. So here's a big problem that vegetation rendering in general with lumen is not yet that good. There are a few issues that we can clearly see here, and there's some really wonky shadow casting right now. So there's a bunch of problems with lumen and vegetation rendering. That will probably be fixed with 5.1, and not with, like, right now, we're on 5.03. So like, more of that stuff is going to be fixed with 5.1. And we can already see that there's a bunch of issues. So if we actually go into show, visualize, and then mesh distance fields, we can see that there are some really wonky distance fields here for the plants. So that is not good at all. And I'm not sure. But back in the day, it was always said that for vegetation, you should do double sided distance fields. But that was for Unreal four. I'm not sure if that holds still true for real five and the new way of distance fields working, but we can try this. So if you open up an object and you go into the built settings, you can scroll down, and here it can change the distance field resolution scales to give it just more resolution. But also, you can do this one here, two sided distance field generation, and then we hit Applied changes, and nothing has happened. And I assumed so because the way that distance fields are generated has drastically changed in Unreal five compared to what it was in Unreal four. We get way better resolution on the distance field, which is a very beautiful thing. However, it is not yet fully clear how actual vegetation will work out. So we could try just doing this. Again, now I'm just trying stuff. So, this actually did do something. Where is our other grass? Let's try this one, too. And let's try five here, apply. So okay, so the thing is, like, it doesn't really look great. However, it is not a blob anymore, because this grass here, you can see, now this is like, just some weird, frozen fluid simulation. But this one is actually like a huge block, and we definitely don't want the huge block to happen. So this can potentially help from what it seems. But again, vegetation is not really supposed to look super good now anyways in Unreal five. And you can see here the distance field memory, it's neglectable. It's not like super insane. But we still do have some kind of, like, bucked out shadows here. By yeah, one thing you can always do is, if you have it selected, you can go and type effect. And then you can just effect distance field lighting. And now you can see that it will not cast these ugly shadows anymore, so we can just turn that off here. And that is something that you can do to sort of, like, temporarily make these things work. But I'm actually, really, really curious how this is going to play out because, like, right now, what Lumen basically does not support is mask materials, and also two sided materials are very tricky with lumen. So yeah, this is one way of doing it, one way that I personally like quite a lot. And then, of course, you can do everything you want also with these materials. So in case you feel like the gray stuff, does it really work for you? We can always go in and I'm holding three to click and I get a vector of three. I will convert this to a parameter and call it base color new because I have the other one here, but it doesn't really matter so much. I just hook this up. And we can, for example, give this a color that potentially matches more with, let's say, the bluish background or whatever we kind of want, right? So now it's just like pure gray. We can make it even brighter to go way more towards white, something like this, if you like. We can also just move into a little blue. We can move into, like, a little little like this kind of color to just give this more, like, a ground kind of kind of feel. So there's so many different ways and flavors of how you can tweak this depending on what you personally like. So, yeah, this is a quick setup for some nice outdoor props. I hope you enjoyed it and had some fun. This is it for now. Thank you so much for watching and see you in the next lesson. 13. Rendering Shiny Assets: Hello and welcome to yet another lesson where we look at beautiful portfolio renderings. So this time around, we have something that I have to admit. I haven't done a lot myself, so I am not really a pro when it comes to this. So let's keep that in mind. However, I think it's pretty safe to say that a lot of the principles that we have covered before are, you know, things that are always reoccurring, coming back. And I also have just research the topic a little bit, so I kind of like know how it's done. But I think this is going to be a fun little exercise to try something cool here. So this time we're going to do a car, and cars are interesting because they are very, very reflective. So the topics that I mentioned before when I said that we need to sculpt the lighting of our object to highlight the interesting shapes that we've created for the models. Like, there is nothing where that is truer than for car rendering because cars like when you think about advertisements and all that kind of stuff, like the car companies, they really, really want to sell you on the shape language of their car. Obviously, because they put a lot of effort into it in designing the car and making the shapes feel a certain way, transporting certain emotion. So car rendering is sort of like the pinnacle of trying to highlight shapes with lighting. If we look at some examples that I have here, you can clearly see that a lot of this stuff is just really like here, for example, if we just look at this light here, it kind of just follows along the car, makes it readable, like, really puts emphasis on the shape. It's very similar to the small picture here as well, which is like a concept art, obviously. But still, it is sort of like meant to really highlight the shape language of the car and make it very readable. So there are a bunch of different approaches to doing car rendering or photography or whatever you kind of want to call it, because it also depends a little bit on the sort of realism you want to achieve. Like, you can do something more studio lighting. You can do something more realistic. Like, for example, down here, these two images that we can see they are clearly having a proper back plate. There is an add on for Unreal that you can use like a plugin, where you can load in an HDRI and it gives you sort of like turns it into a ground plate as well. It is a bit blurry and not super great. So I'm not going to use it. I'm not a huge fan of this. And when you look at really good examples of this, they actually really build like the background. So if we look at this here, and we go into the samples. You can see, for example, there's the car configurator, and the car configurator is pretty cool because this is like an actual three D environment that has all the stuff in here. And as you can see, it provides, some good reflections. It has the scene rather grounded. So if you want to do something like this, then I really suggest just getting these scenes and throwing a car in there. This is not really what we're going to do today here because this is basically there is no real lighting setup in the sense of we need to really sculpt the lighting. This is very natural. For this, you basically just need a proper sky and need a proper environment, and that is where the reflection comes from. This stuff here is almost more like what we're going to do at the end of the course where we do the big environment and you could potentially then drop a car in there and do this. So there is this kind of stuff. I think there there are actually more, as well. Like, if we go to the marketplace, and then the appingGame content. There's a bunch of really, really good samples in here for many different use cases. So like I've said a few times, like, always go through samples and all that stuff. So here's the automotive salt flats, which is from the car configurator, there should be another one as well. Like, here's, for example, the winter scene. This is quite interesting, too. So you get an environment like this where you can put your car and just put it on the street and then, render it out. There's a few different parameters and setups here that are pretty cool. So that one is slice, and I think there is, like, another one as well. Yeah, it's like a bridge thing. So you can see this is pretty cool here. You can see the curbs, they're really, like, modeled properly. So you get some nice little variation in detail. I love this here in the background with the mountain vanishing into the clouds. It's actually pretty cool here. I haven't opened up the scene myself, but here you can clearly see that, like, the bridge is floating, and this is like an HDR background. But that is fine. And you can do stuff like this with it, as you can see. So really, really cool stuff here. So this is one thing that you can do. But what we're going to look at is more something like what we see here. Because, obviously, we're going to reuse the little scene that we've already built. And for these things here, it is very important that quite often, you see that the shadows are really diffuse, which means that there's either a very, very large area light that sort of blurs the shadows, or it is really lighting coming from an HDR background. So if I just open this and I do like cnder HDRI, and then we look at this, you can see that again, well, it's not many examples here, but, you know, there's these very interesting kind of textures here, like these kind of things that are basically just designed to give really, really great highlights on the car. So these are not about creating a realistic studio or anything like that. These are really just purely to emphasize shapes. In case you're interested, there's a really cool program. This one here is called HDR Light Studio. And what you do is basically you put the car in here, and then you have these lamp shapes down here, and you just drag them in and put them into space to highlight these things, and it basically creates this thing. So I think I haven't used this tool myself. Here you can see that this is how it works, and then it creates this very abstract HDRI for you and you can sculpt the reflection precisely. So we can't really do that in this way. So what we will do is we will actually just use some of the HDRIs that we've already looked at. So you can see here is my skylight. From last time, I also still have the same simple lighting B cube map applied here. So if I just turn this on, you can see that this is kind of like something that I'm getting. And you can already see that it is sort of like highlighting some of the shapes a little bit depending on from where I look or how I rotate this. And if you're wondering, what is this car. So this is really just from the city sample vehicles. That's the one from the Matrix demo. There's like a separate set with the cars. And I just chose the sports car. So one of the most important things, like I mentioned in the other sessions as well is that for car rendering, all the settings for which HDRI you use and how it's rotated, they have to be specific per camera shot. Like if you can do multiple shots with exactly the same settings for the HDR and all that kind of stuff, then you're very, very lucky. But it is probably not going to work because you're going to want to sculpt it really precisely to the type of shot that we are doing. So I would say we're going to start with something like this. And now one interesting thing is also, like, since I haven't done a lot of car stuff, I'm like, Hey, so what are actually the most common settings that people that do car rendering or car photography use? When they do that on their camera. And I found this quite interesting thing here. They're a bunch more articles about the topic. So they talk about how to in the first installment. I haven't read that, but they just talk about how you should place your car, for example. But this relates a lot more to, like, a real environment. So, if you would have a three D environment, it could be very valuable, and it's about how to place the car so you get wanted reflections and not a lot of unwanted reflections. I mean, it could be that, for example, there would be the sun reflecting super strongly on the window and you may not want that, so you need to keep these things in mind. However, here, what I find a lot more interesting is this breakdown of the lenses being used and how it makes stuff feel and look like. So this first photo is taken at 24 millimeters. And since the background is not super blurry, we also know that it's taken at quite a high aperture value here. So at least, I would say something above 5.6. So it maintains a sort of crispness here. But still, this is a tiny little bit out of focus, but really not a lot. It's just, like, so it's not like equally as sharp as the front. But we can see we get a lot of distortion on the car, and this kind of looks cool. So this could be something that you would really want. And then if we go down here, we can see. So from the top one, we change to this one with 38 millimeters, 48, 70 92, 135, and 200. You can really see how the image becomes a lot more flat. And to be very honest, I do think that this one down here at 200, it kind of looks weird a bit. It's almost like autographic. Like when you switch to autographic camera and you rotate it, it kind of makes it feel weird. So, personally, I think, so if this is 38, 48, and this is 70, I think for me, like 70 feels kind of like the sweet spot. These are still a bit too distorted, and they almost feel like that, they don't know what they want to do. So this one is really aggressive. I prefer that if you want to have such an angle. But then again, that's just me speaking here. I'm no car photographer, and this is really just my personal taste. Like, this one here, specifically, it feels almost a little bit undecided, if it wants to be a bit more flat and neutral or if it still wants to be distorted. I think this one here at 70 millimeters, to me, seems like the best of both worlds. So however, looking at this here, this seems to be a rather flat like perspective in a certain way. Like this one here, for example, if we look at this, this does quite have a bit of distortion. This one, not so much. So I don't actually really know, but I think we should try something that is probably along the 48 to 70 millimeters. And again, this is really just trying. So I'm going to move this out of the way, but on my second screen so I can see it. And then we're going to add our camera. And now, one really important thing also is they were completely not talking about the sensor size stuff. So this is really something that we kind of have to eyeball because we really don't know So I'm just looking at the image to the left here. And one thing that is rather interesting. So if we look at this here, so we can see that we do get a lot more perspective squishing here. Like, this is a lot more like parallel. So this kind of suggests that we should look at our focal length a bit and see that we probably have something smaller. But, first of all, I'm going to go to this. And now this has already changed. So now we're already having something that is a bit more squished here. And I'm going to try a few different things here. So the first thing that I'm going to try is let's do this. And it does squish quite a bit. Now, let's try something more conservative here and see I think this might be closer. Again, it is a bit tricky for me to, like, frame it exactly the same way. But something like this feels quite okay. Let's try one more here. This kind of starts to feel like it might actually be more close to what that was. So now let's see if we just do this, it doesn't work. So let's do this, and then we go to under and wait Custom. Why does it not allow me to go custom? Okay, so now that I entered this, it allows me to go to custom, and then we can just go in here and do like 150. And this might actually be for now the sweet spot for me. It is a bit hard to navigate this camera because we're quite far away because of the long lens, so it is a bit fiddly, but it's going to be fine. So now what we're going to do is we just, like, focus this thing. There we go. I'm going to do it like this sort of like at the midway through the car. And then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to put this to eight to make it that we're really, really crisp here. So now you can see that the HDR does not really do the perfect highlighting, right? So a solution could be to just rotate this around and see what happens. And now you can see here we're getting this nice line. But still, it is a bit not exactly how we potentially want this. So this is going to be a little bit, like, of a fiddly thing, and that is right. So one thing that I'm going to do now is I'm going to lock the camera. I'm going to go out here. And I want to quickly talk about something that I recently just noticed, and it was quite interesting for me. I didn't really know a lot was happening. I wanted to share this with you. I don't necessarily have a super full, workaround for this, but it's more like, I just want to raise awareness that this is something that is happening and that you kind of have to keep in mind a little bit. So, since this is like Lumen right now, there are quite a bunch of things that sort of have changed compared to how things used to work in OnRilFour because, like, Unreal four didn't really have that sort of, like, accurate environment in terms of, like, that all the entities in the scene contribute to the lighting equally. So it was a little bit easier to fake certain things. Now these things have become a lot more complicated to fake because Lumen is more accurate. So what do I mean by that? You guys may remember when I had the scene with the Chrome ball, right? And I actually had a little bit of troubles of, like, fully making sense of this, but it came to me and Oops. I started to make more sense of these things. So I'm going to put this one in here. Let's make this a bit smaller. This is very large. So we have this guy, and obviously we can see here there's, like, some nice plltion happening, all the good stuff, right? So, this is what I mean with, like, the courtesy here. It is quite cool to have that the little drop shadow good stuff. However, if we go in here in my content, I'm just searching for chrome right now and I'm applying this chrome material to the additosphere. So you can see, this is what we have here, right? So we can see a bit of the car, and you can see this is really ugly because of the lumen reflections not being the most precise reflections. And as you may remember, we had this thing where I was like, damn, why is our bottom half black here? And I found out that this is something that is caused by the lumen reflections. If you go to tracing, it actually traces this one here properly. And if I go to lumen, it kind of, like, does this weird thing where it sort of has a bit of it, but also, it's a bit borky. And if I go to screen space, it suddenly shows the bottom half of the actual HDR. And at first, I thought it was, like, lower hemisphere solid color because, like, now you can see I have the lower hemisphere as solid color. But I had that turned off here. And when I switch back in my post process volume to screen space reflections, now I get only the HDR and the screen space reflections. And this is how it was sort of in On reel four. And with Lumen, things have changed. And it's just a bit, like, interesting. I don't fully yet understand why this is happening. I mean, we could potentially, I guess, look at the lumen scene here. But you see, it's like, you know, there is no black floor here in the lumen scene. So it takes this and it kind of, like, doesn't really do anything with the other stuff. So this is one thing. So let's try something really interesting because let's say that we want our car to cast shadows onto the ground. But let's say we don't actually want the ground to contribute to the overall lighting in here. Let's see if we can actually do that because sometimes unreal has, like, a lot of these hacky things. So let's see if I go in here and do effect distance field lighting, do you see what happens? So now every it still receives shadows, but it's not part of the equation anymore here. So now we basically just fixed this and also, interestingly enough, hitting this made it so it's not fully black anymore. So now this actually looks proper. So this is very, very interesting. And this is what I mean with, like, you know, there's also lumen and stuff. There are still inconsistencies. So it is just a bit important to know that there is all these little tweaks that you can touch to do things. And that is also why it's quite helpful to have something like this. Now that I moved it, it actually became black again. So let's do this. And now it's actually bord again, which is pretty hilarious if you ask me. I don't really know why this is happening. Let's have a look here. So this is really interesting. Let's do this and then go into our skylight and just trying to recapture this here. So this here now it's not working anymore, and no one really knows why. So this is quite hilarious, if you ask me. One thing that we can try further, even though we turned off the distance field lighting or effect distance field lighting, we can go into our object here, and then in the build settings. So if you want to have something also removed from lumen or distance field lighting, the same works in unveil four as well. So if you want to make sure that when you have distance field AO turned on, but you don't want an object to contribute, you can actually go into the distance field resolution scale. And set this to zero and then apply changes. And this will basically completely eliminate the distance field, and now this has actually worked. So this is interesting. This may be that there was a cached result, and the lumen seen cache did actually not update properly when we turned off effect distance field lighting. Let's see if this is true by moving this, and now we see it does not snap back into the black thing because now we have literally turned off the distance field for the floor. So now this is quite a little bit different. This can be helpful as well because if you like, for example, let's say you have a sunlight and it bounces onto your object, and you don't want that because you want to really fake things a bit more, then you can just completely remove it from the distance field equation. So with that in our minds, we may also look at this here and see that our aluminum reflections are a little bit, like, you know, not the greatest here. And potentially speaking, this should improve things. But for some reason, I don't really see a lot of improvements here. And if you may remember, if we go to the project settings, and to rendering, you can see that I have support hardware tracing on but potentially, oh, I have this off. Let's see. Ha. There we go. So here, okay? So sorry for this. So if we do this and we have this, you can see that there are some changes with the reflections, which are quite interesting. So this way, we get a lot more accurate reflections from Lumen itself. And this can be a valuable thing to do, especially for car rendering. So I hope this was not too confusing, but there's a bunch of these things that have an impact. And also, you can see that I had the quality at four. Like, if I would lower that, it would just be, excuse me, a lot more blobby and even worse. So I run a little bit of, like, some higher settings here just to make sure that all this stuff is really clean. So now before we continue, one thing that I really don't like is the color of this car. I think it is really, really boring. And here is this thing. I'm not really sure if this works properly. So let's just do this. Yeah, kind of does. So we can do this. There's a bit of metallicness to this It's kind of cool. I don't think we have proper flakes and stuff, but let's just set the color to silver and see what we can do with this. It's kind of cool. Zo, let's go to our cinematic camera actor here. Let's pilot this guy. So we can clearly see that we do get a lot less well, shadowing here with our Lumen scene calculation. So we may need to see if we actually want to fake this with, like, an area light or something. So let's see about that. But first of all, I do think that we may actually want this to be more squished. Let's do this. And it's always like, you know, sometimes you're not really happy. It's a constant back and forth of certain things. So let's just see. I think I do like this a bit more. Alright. I'm gonna lock this guy again. So now, looking at this, this does not look like a great car rendering thing for me because we have a lot of light from the bottom. And I don't think that's what we want. So I'm going to just go into my folder here where I have a bunch of these guys. And what I'm going to do is I'm basically just gonna switch through some of these and just really see what happens. And I'm going to rotate this around and you can see that there are a bunch of little issues here with the precision. And that is most likely because of this using normal maps and not just geometry or something. So this really also depends on just how you have modeled your car. I'm going to do 1024 here, so we can see that there's like a sharper reflection now. So, if you look at it, if I go 128, you can see it's rather blurry. I go 1024. We want this to be really highs again, because car rendering. We're just trying to find something nice here, which this is not yet. So this, for example, is quite cool. Like, as you can see, it does highlight some of the shapes nicely, but I still think this is also not really yet perfect. So let's see. Oh, this is quite cool. Ah, this is quite cool. So see if I just pull this over here. We can get some really, like, nice shapes. And also, we get a lot of shadow back here. So it always just depends on how we rotate this guy. So I actually do really like this one here, which gives us this long line. It highlights these little things here as well. So this is quite cool. Yeah, I do like this. Looks great on the lights as well. So now we have this. And honestly, I don't necessarily know how to fix these little firefly issues down here. It's probably, again, some lumen quality settings. Like, I don't know. Let's just bump this. See, there we go. Final gather to six. And again, because this does not have to run. This is just really for working and trying to get as high detail as possible. I do like see here this little haloing, which I'm also not a big fan of. I don't know how much we can bump these things to make these go away because, again, a lot of this is still I wouldn't call it experimental, but still there is, you know, I think six might be the maximum here. I don't really see a difference. This seems unrelated. So we have this now. So this is pretty damn cool. Now I'm going to go out of this. Go to click the guy here. I'm going to hit this so we can see it. And now, what I want to do is I want to see if I can actually do something with an area light in a cool way. So let's just get this guy out here. I want to see this shape. And the first thing that I will do is going to drag this up here, turn on my snapping, and I'll rotate it 90, and we're going to move it over here. So now you can see that, so here's the thing. This is not about the lighting right now. Right now, this is purely about the shape. So how much light this actually makes onto the car is something that is sort of irrelevant for me. But what I want is I want to figure out if I can use this to shape the reflections further, right? And I'm just moving this so I can see what it does. So we can see it starts coming in down here as well. And now we can see that it's also moving away here. So it's probably not bright enough. So I'm just going to crank this. And now you can see what I'm starting to get here. And this is really interesting. So one thing that we can instantly notice, based on the positioning here, right? So you can see that I'm getting this stuff down here, which is, if we look at this, it's very similar, but you can see that we here also have this stuff and you can then recognize when I pull this, we're actually just getting that stuff here. So what this tells me is that this is sort of like a combined effort here of different things. So I'm going to pull it kind of like this maybe. I'm trying to be careful not to get too much of, like, chado here, and now I'm going to copy this. And I'm just like, again, I'm by no means like a pro, so I'm just going to copy this over. And I'm trying to find something here that'll help me Woops. Alright. So here we kind of go So this is kind of like this. So now we can see that this is way too bright compared to the other one. So what we're going to do is just going to drag this down and make this kind of feel the same. And now, if we look at this, this looks pretty dope. This looks really cool. Then, of course, we do get a little bit of some weird reflections here. Again, the car is maybe not the best example because of so here we go, like you can see, I can try to change this a little bit. So there will be a little bit of artifacts depending on the precision of the model. I think this looks really, really cool already. I'm just going to save this in case my stuff here crashes, which we hope is not going to happen. Um, so now what we can do here is, let's go into our surfaces for mega scans. And now I just want, like, some concrete stuff here. Let's see. Like, something cool and industrial looking. This is a bit too crazy. Mm. This is not really smooth concrete, but cooled. I do kind of like this, so I just will I want something that has nice variation, but it's not like too crazily noisy, because you can already see here that, these are repeating. So here's the loop so got to be careful with these things. But obviously, you could also, like, I'm just going to use this for now. But you could always combine together and mask them by, like, a noise mask to sort of get rid of the tiing, which is something that I've done a lot in the past. There's just a little tip here on the side. So if you have something like this, just take one that is like simula and then break them up by lurping against each other with a noise pattern that usually gets the job done very well. So I got this guy over here. I'm going to put this on here. So there we go. Fantastic tiling. And I will just change this here. Yeah, we can do more. And again, like, here you can see now the repetition coming in, right? So that's, like, one thing that we may want to be really careful of so this looks kind of nice. Again, the scale here might be a little off because, of course, there's a bit of a low detail thing. So the perfect way would obviously be to take two different kind of surfaces and larp them against each other. But again, this is lighting series here and not like a material creation series. But I think you all get what I mean by this. I will darken this a bit, I feel like, just to help stick it out a bit more. Oh, yeah, this is kind of cool. And now, maybe just maybe. Tiny little bit, super tiny little nudge here. Yeah, kind of like this. So I think this looks pretty cool. So here we have something nice. It also helped with the halo stuff here to darken the ground material, because now the contrast is just overall a lot better. So this worked really, really well. So let's see what we get. Oh, I'm saving. Yeah, so let's see what we get when we do a high resolution screenshot that has a good multiplier because in an ideal world, it will minimize these artifacts as well from the resolution scaling. So let's just try that. Let's go with two capture this. There we go. So you can see it's still a bit there. But there's one really important thing that I feel is very valuable. When you do this, this also shows people like that you have been using a real time tool. You render this an unreal five. You say, like, I rendered this an unreal five, and there are the artifacts that just come from rendering in Unreal five. And I think it's nothing really to be ashamed of because it shows people you can do some really, really good stuff. However, you're not immune to the rendering artifacts that Unreal just comes with. So for this now, I would actually go in and go into my postpcess volume here. I'm going to move this to the side. I'm going to just make sure of a bunch of things. So like I do have my vineyard here, This time, I would actually go down with the vineyard a little bit. And most importantly, I will reduce the film rain here quite a bit because this is supposed to be really high def. So like, some of the settings that I gave you before, they don't always make sense because this is like this needs to be crisp. And you can, of course, be even more crazy with this. So I'm just like, I'm going to try this, and I hope that my video cap is not gonna crash on me, and it even warns me here. Alright, this worked. So this is pretty cool here. Yeah. So this is nice. And one of the things that you should do when you do this high multiplier is, like, you're not going to use it like this. So what are you going to do is you're going to open this in Photoshop, and then you actually size it down by, like, you know, like you just make it, let's say, 1920 by 1080, and you use bicubic, and it will basically act almost like the image has been super sampled. So it will create a sort of sharpening effect and make everything look super crisp, which then creates really good looking shots. This is basically how you can do car lighting. Of course, there's a lot of ways to alter this. Let's try something funny very quickly, but I don't want to make this video too long. We're already at some good time here. But let's say, I'm just going to go out of this. How does it even look from a different perspective with the tweaks that we did? Because we can see here you can see, this does not work with the lights that we have. So let's do a little fun exercise very quickly. So remember when we looked at this, I did like the what was it? 24 millimeters? So let's just quickly do this. I'm going to add a new cinematic camera actor. I'm going to go in here and pilot this guy. All right. So then let's go to this. We don't really have 24 here. So what we're gonna do is 24 and 24. And now this is set. So let's do this sort of kind of aggressive angle here. Something like this. I will turn off this guy. I will also turn off this guy. Then let's do eight here and focus on our beautiful car here like this. Let's do this just to make sure that we're really crisp. Could have done this on the other shot, too. Like, sometimes there is still a tiny little bit of depth of field there, so that happens. So let's look at our skylight here. Yeah, this may not be the best choice. Let's try something utter cool. There's a bunch of these here. Uh, it's kind of too noisy for my taste. If I remember correctly, there's also a setting in the project setting to use super high precision normal thingi. This may actually improve the rendering of the reflections on the car. This is very busy. I don't like it. So there might be some more settings that I have not really used yet to actually improve some of these things. This kind of weird. It just like wobbles around in a very busy and noisy So here we have something again, that gives more silhouette. But you can see it is rather tricky for certain angles to find something good. So this is kind of like not super bad if we do this. But what we can see is we totally lack something in the bag, right? And also, what we would need to do here is we would need to do our fog thing again, right? So I've turned the fog off here. So we would need to do something like this, and we can take this and make it like black, right? And then we need to figure out here. This is interesting. Why are we not moving closer to our camera with the ****? So, okay, we had the volumetric overridden here. So just a super quick tweak here. Obviously, not that fantastic, but it gets the job done for now. So I'm going to lock this guy, as well. Go out of this, pin it, and then we would need to, of course, go in again and do something here in a way that helps us to highlight the shape again. So really, it's not about casting light. It is about creating shape here on this car. So you can see just like adding little highlights here, trying to connect this a little bit. We'll see when we crank this So you can see we just slowly start sculpting this. And we also get a little highlight back here. This is by no means perfect, but we're just trying to make the car shape more readable. Here's a bit of an issue with how they blend. So this is something that could be, like, tweaked a bit further, maybe like this. But again, you know, there's so many, many ways of doing this. And of course, you can also add like crazy colors, right? Like, no one says you can't do crazy colors. So I don't know. Like, can do all sorts of things here depending on what you want to do. I'm not saying this is beautiful, I'm just doing something random. So, if you want, you can totally do things like this, right? And then we can also look into this here and see if we may want to do some more things. So again, you can do all sorts of cool things here and just, you know, whatever you feel like, do some funky colors here, reposition the light a bit. Like if I go out of this again and click the camera and pin it and go to this one here, like, you know, Get some really fucky stuff. You could use this for, like, I don't know, like for like a flyer or something, do something crazy with it. Yeah, whatever. Now I'm just, like, doing stupid stuff, fooling around a bit. But you get the idea. So many options to do this. So I hope this was helpful. Thank you so much for watching and see you in the next lesson. Oh 14. Rendering portrait Characters: Hello, and welcome to the next session. This time around, we're going to tackle one of the most well, I wouldn't say controversial topics, but definitely one of the topics where you'll find no real consensus on how to do it. And that is character lighting. So there are a huge amount of ways to do this. So like I've been stressing throughout this course, many times already, like, this is how I like to do it. This is how I approach my work, which does by no means, suggest that this is the way to do it or that other ways are not the correct way. It is really, like a lot of these things just come down to, like, personal taste and what you would like to do. So for example, I really like a photographic approach to character rendering. However, I can totally understand that depending on the subject, you may want to do something entirely different. So for example, when I think about character presentation, I really quite often think about portrait photography. And, of course, you can also look for different photography. You can look for, like, fashion photography, like all these kinds of things, right? I just really do like portrait photography, so that is kind of like the way how I'm going to show this first part. And I think when you do this, like, there's a bunch of really interesting things that can potentially be helpful. Part one is that when you look at all these, they obviously have a certain setup, right? So it can be beneficial to read about portrait photography, like, see how are studio setups for these kinds of things actually done? How does it work? And that is a really, really interesting topic that I can't really go into detail much because it is very, very complex, and there's so much to learn and read, and it's about different light sources and all these kind of crazy things. So this is really, like I tried to tackle this a bit more from like a natural point of view, which is, like, look at something, we tried to figure it out, and then we tried to build something from it. So that is the way that we're going to do it. But then there's also another way which, like, let's say, I'm just, like, googling this now, and let's see what we can come up with. So there's, as you can see, lots and lots of different ways. Let's do Like, you know, when you just look at these, there's different ways like these are presented on, like, pure white. So stuff like this, for this, you kind of like you just light the character, and then you render out a mask, and then you comp it in Photoshop. Like, you don't really render it like this inside of unreal, for example. I was thinking of something more these are actually quite boring. I'm a little bit disappointed now. But I thought like, some cool, like, you know, background gradient and stuff like this is kind of cool. These clay renders. And they're very similar to what we did before with the prop rendering. So not really much new stuff here. Yeah, so there's, like, stuff like this, right? These are all rather straightforward. So there's a lot of different ways on doing these things and doing your work. Personally, again, I do like the more realistic approach over the two stylized approach, but I do agree it also really depends on the content. And something interesting to know is when we look at something like this, for example, this is most likely using almost purely an HDR lighting, and then it may have one very soft and large key light. So a lighting setup like this is really rather simple. I do prefer that a lot over the let's see if we can find it. So, I mean, this stuff looks cool, right? So I'm not saying it doesn't look cool whatsoever. It is more like I'm not a super huge fan personally of this, like crazy Hollywood lighting with, like, you know, rim light here and there and stuff. Like, I do like it a bit more natural. So with all of this Z, there's a bunch of other things that are of importance, and again, you can go in so deep. So one is, of course, you want to decide for a setting for your presentation. So this can be a studio setting like we have here, very nice and simple. However, this can also be like an outdoor setting. So I really do like something like this here. It's very nice and soft lighting. And it doesn't have this huge rim light thing. So this one here is interesting because this one feels very natural, too, but we can also see that we have this bright line back here and something catching from the hair. And also, we can see it on the cheek here and on the jaw. So this is a lot more of an elaborate, like, light setup than this one here is, for example. And what we're going to do is we're going to try to analyze and see why something looks the way it does, and we try to replicate it. This is also quite nice. And I will try to help you find ways that when you look at reference like this to understand how can you actually do something like this? There's a few ways of figuring these things out, and it's going to be, I feel like rather interesting. And then of course, you can also do stuff that is more natural outdoor kind of stuff. And with outdoor photography, it's really important that you just have the perfect kind of conditions. I was I was like, outside with my girlfriend at some point, and it was, like, rather late in the day. And the sky was so incredible. Like, I looked at her and I was like, Can you, like, just, like, stop walking and, like, turn around a bit? We're, like having a little walk by the beach. And like I was like, Yeah, turn, turn a bit, turn a bit. And then, like, the skylight and everything, it was just hitting in the most perfect way. I did not have my camera with me, so didn't take any pictures then. I tried, like, another day when there was also, some beautiful weather but late in the day, and the lighting was just not the same. It just didn't look the same. So for outdoor portrait photography, you need to get really lucky. It is really just like up to nature if you're going to get good pictures or not because you don't have a lot of control over it if you basically take pictures only with natural light. I love that a lot, like, really just only use natural light, but then again, you're at the mercy of nature. Something like what we see here is probably using some fake lighting, too. So like, you know, they have, like, a huge screen, like a white screen with a light behind and they flash her, make a super soft light on her. So this is orchestrated. This is not natural light here. So this is also something to keep in mind. So I'm going to pull these aside. And what I have here is the mega scan not mega scan, sorry, the meta human sample project. And I have no lights in here. This is the girl that we all know and have seen, and we don't really see her now, but that's fine. So this is what we have here. And so portrait photography, what you want to do is you want to have a camera setting that makes the character or the person look as natural as possible. And the most important thing there is your lens, because as we've seen with the car rendering, that when you have a very short focal length, you will skew the features of the face. So let's just do something super quickly here. Just go to add a rectangular light source, which is going to be like wherever here. Oops. So I got my character here. I go to do something like this so we can sort of see it. So now, if I drag in a camera here, So I'm going to focus this here. Like, I'm going to do this and try to get this a little bit into or focus here. All right. So right now, I have a focal length of 35. And if we do 24, you can see, if I get close, like the face becomes really, like, skewed, right? And if I do, on the other side, let's do like 150. Now you can see that the face you know, let's do focus tracking quickly. Um, let's do tracking. And let's pick this. So now it constantly refocus. So now you can see that the face looks rather like flat in comparison. And what has been found out over the years over time is that the sweet spot for portrait photography is somewhere 70-135 millimeters. And many people say that the absolute sweet spot is 85 millimeters. It has the best sort of preservation of features for a phase. And what's also important is what kind of depth of field you want to have because when you look at portrait photography, if we just look at this one here, you can see that the lady here is in total focus. However, it already, starts here with her hand being a little bit out of focus, and then the background is really blurry, and you kind of want that. You want the background to be blurry, so your subject is in full focus here. But you can see that here, the part of the arm is actually already slightly out of focus, which means we have a very shallow depth of field. All these things need to be considered theoretically speaking, but since we're in the digital realm, it does work a little bit different for us. We have a bit more leeway regarding the field and all these different settings because, of course, this is not a real camera. So that is one thing to keep in mind here. So what I want to do is, I want to change this one here to full frame the SLR. Because usually, this is what you have when you do your photography, sort of, right? So let's say we have a full frame DSLR. Now you can see that this one here is an exception, but when we look at these, they're all more like they're not in a white format, but they're like, you know, like when you twist your camera by 90 degrees. So it's more something like this. And there's two ways of doing that. Number one is to, like, literally, rotate your camera. Or what I like to do is I actually just flip the sensor width. So I do 24 and 36. So now you see we have a sensor that is like this, which is sort of the same as we would have flipped the camera, and now we do get something more in these lines here. Okay? So this is usually the first thing that I like to do. Now, what I also want to do is I want to go into our lens settings here and I'm going to set this to 85. So this is what we will be using here. And now, the important thing that we need to do is we need to find a way of how we want to present our shot. And I'm going to choose a mixture between this and this. And the thing is, like, I don't really want to pose this character now. You can see, even when somebody looks straight at the camera, it is actually quite nice when their body is slightly rotated. So there's always a little bit of rotation going on. And here you can see that the head is facing a little bit towards us. It's not perfectly, rotated like this example here, if I would go even more sideways. But then the eyes is what's really doing the thing here. So I could do all this, but I won't. So, this is a bit more of an interesting rotation here, kind of like this, because this will allow us to get some depth of field here. And I'm going to reset this to manual. And now the interesting part will come because we're at aperture 12 here, right? So now we can decide, so what do we want to be in focus? So this is the first thing. So I think what we want to be in focus is, like, sort of this area. We definitely want to have the eye in focus and the nose and the mouth sort of here. So maybe just move it a tiny little bit, maybe like this. Oops. Let's do. This. So now, with this setup, if I start reducing my aperture, we will start blurring what's in front and in the back. So if I do like 2.8, we can see that we now have gotten some softening here on the shoulder, which is actually pretty nice, but we still have some nice high risk detail here. So this is something that we can absolutely do. And we also need to decide if we want the eye here to be blurred as well. So, if we look at this, let's try to make this. Large by open the image in a new tab here. So here we can see that we do actually have focus on these parts here as well. But the hair behind the head and the shoulder do get quite blurry. So that means that we either have a different lens and more distance with a more shell depth of field or we do have an even, like, less aperture of, like, for example, 1.8. And then we would probably have to move, see how it starts getting blurry too quickly here. So if I want to do this, and I want that strong up the field, we probably need to switch here to, let's say, 105 and then we of course, need to reconfigure this here. So there's going to be a little back and forth here, right on how to get this done. So we can see that we have some nice blur, but also this eye here is not exactly how we want it. So I assume now, let's try this. And then refocus So here you can see, we do have more crispness now, and we still have the shallow depth of field. But I was actually quite okay with what we had before. So I'm going to reset this. I keep the 2.8 for now, but now I just want to, like, reframe this again. And I do like this. And I really like the very soft depth of field that we're getting here. So let's say that this is kind of like what we really like, okay? So, obviously, the lighting is not that great yet. So what can we learn? So how do we know how this is lit, right? And this is where it gets interesting. So if we look at this, one thing that we can see here is we do see a rather large highlight in the eyes here. Okay. We also see that there is a little bit of shadow here from the nose. So you can clearly see a tiny shadow. However, we can see that all the shadowing is super soft. And what this tells us with the combination that there is no light here in the back is that there is most likely, most likely, only one or two light sources. And the noise here in the reflection of the eye, it basically comes from the eyelashes. There might be a second light source that is doing the highlight on top of her head for the hair. However, we see that like it could there's definitely one light source coming from this side here at that is putting on this tiny little shadow. So it's almost in front of her, but a little bit to the right, and maybe there's another one on top that creates the softing here. So there's not more lights than that. If we look at this, however, there is definitely a light to the right side here, and there's definitely a rather large light to the left which makes the most reflection in the eye here. And here, we can also see the reflection of the strong light from here, and then there's a little bit of something in the eye here, but mostly there's a light sort of in the back. And this is the way that we can think about how we actually place our lights in space. So I'm going to take this camera here. I'm going to lock this. I'm going to go out of it. I'm going to pin it. And you can see I have this background here. I think this is even the meta human background. I don't know what is this stuff. Don't need it. So this is just really the default setup here. And let's see what are we using here? So it looks like we're actually using this one. So one thing here, this project does not have the correct value set that I used before. So that is one thing to keep in mind here. Like, it doesn't really use any of the EV 100 settings, which is right now not super important because we don't actually need all these values. We could do it, but it doesn't really matter at all. So I'm just going to because, remember, when I did it the first time around where I said the values are they can look the same, no matter which type of values you choose. So what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to take a post process volume here. I will make it unbound. I will go to the exposure. I'm going to just put this to zero and put these to one. One. So now here's a bunch of different things that we could do, right? Like, you may remember that in the last projects, we also had this kind of stuff here. So we could potentially say, like, Hey, why don't we start using this environment lighting for the character. So I'm going to take a skylight here. Go to switch this to movable. I'm going to switch to specified cube map. Going to go into the advanced tab, turn this one off, and now I'm just going to add my photo studio here, right? So now we can see that we are lighting our character with this, like, photo studio environment. Going to crank this up a bit here, and then we can obviously, rotate this to get some more stuff going here. And you can see, yeah, well we get some rim lighting here, we get something. But the thing is like it is never really super precise, right? But it also does not look like super bad, but then you can see it doesn't really trigger nice effects on our skin and all that kind of stuff. So it is not necessarily that great tier, if we look at this, right? So I don't really recommend for a photographic setup to do this. What I recommend is to really go in and think like you're building your own studio but with your own lights, okay? That is usually how I would approach this. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to delete this I will go out of the camera actor. Gonna pin it again. And now I will just turn on this guy again. So looking at our girl here, where is my girl here. So looking at this, so we kind of know that we have a rather large and soft light source here that comes slightly from the off angle. So let's try to build this. And remember, since our character does not face the same way, does it do the same thing with the eyes, there will be obviously differences. So let's just keep that in mind. And one very important thing that we also have to keep in mind, all the shadows here look really bad. And the reason for that is, like, I'm not using the the virtual shadow map. And for character lighting, I would definitely urge everybody to use trace shadows because it just looks so much better. If you can't do traced shadows, I'm just going to rotate this a bit and drag this here over. So you'll see how we don't really get, like, proper shadows because we do get shadow here, but on the nose, like, there's a lot of missing stuff here. So one thing you can try and I'm not sure if it's going to work properly, but here's this feature. It's called contact shadows. And this is like a shadow that is done in screen space. So it's like the screen space reflections or something like that, and it helps to ground and fill gaps. So if I do this, here, you can see now we're actually getting some more correct shadowing here, right? And you can see it makes already a huge, huge difference. But then again, you can see how the shadow disappears here because it can only render shadow from things that are visible. So if you don't have rate racing and you really can only use the normal shadow map, you should definitely use these. However, I will just turn on tracing because I need soft lighting. As we have seen here, we want to have really soft lighting, and normal shadow maps don't do the soft lighting thing. So let's go here and to enabled. And now you can see we get this little nudge here. And this is a very nice and soft traced shadow here. And as you remember, here we have the little notch. So now what we need to do is we need to make sure that the position of our little notch and our specular highlights is simular. So the way we do that is we try to get this here. Done. So what I will do is I will need to open a separate viewport because I need to sort of, like, see it really up close. Like, you know, I need to really see all the detail here. And it does. It's a bit bad here with the LODs. So let's quickly try something. Let's do cinematic. Did that fix it? So we have a bit of, like, a LOD flickering here, which is not that great. Let's see if we can Yeah, this, like, flickering is really annoying. I don't Honestly, what is the lot sink? Uh huh, for slot zero. Yeah, there we go. Okay, great. This, this fixed it. Okay, wow. Now, so this looks beautiful. Alright? So now when we see this, this really helps us to understand what is actually happening here. So I'm going to just put this here. So I can see stuff, and I will unpin this because it will just eat performance to have too many viewports and the rate racing and stuff. So now what we need to do is we need to sort of, like, try and find the right way that this could actually be here. So you see the further we move away, things change, right? So, now the light is really harsh, and we get very strong light here, we get very strong reflection. So this could actually be something that you would want, right? Like, you maybe would want to do the lighting like this. And as you can see, this already looks really, really nice, right? So there's absolutely nothing wrong with doing this. You could go a bit higher here. More like this. You could go into the local light mode and just rotate this downwards a bit. Like, look at this. Actually This is already something quite nice, right? So there's absolutely nothing here that prevents you from saying, This is really what I want. So it always comes down to your taste as well. I'm rotating this again a bit. You can see how it affects the character, right? You can see what these changes do here. And it is a bit intense here. So there's two things you can do. You can move the light further away, kind of like this, or you can keep it close and then just like, maybe lower the intensity, something like this. So one thing and I'm freestyling right now on purpose, I'm not really in this mode right now because when you do this and you feel like, Hey, I like this. So one thing that is really important, when you look at this just as a reference, like, there is no rim light here, but we still see things. And what this means is that there is actually another light coming from the left. However, this light is very, very soft and low intensity. So this means it's very big and it's very soft and like I said, very low intensity. So what this should look like, most likely, is something like this here. I'm just going to put this in and, like, put it over here and I'm going to rotate this a bit. Well, let's just bring this over here. You can see how the specular highlights on the character behave depending on how we position this. So make this movable. And I'm going to do ray trace shadows as well. Alright? So now you can see we obviously cast like a proper shadow from this, and this is not necessarily what we want. So the way to fix this is really by going into the size and just making this really large because this is going to be like a super large file. And you can see how the shadow, it doesn't necessarily disappear, but it becomes very, very soft, right? And this is a very big soft box here, so that is not usually how it happens. So usually they are smaller and further away. But you can do this. If you have a white screen, for example, you can get stuff like this. So you can see how we're just filling in a little bit here to make sure that this is not fully black here. And again, there is probably quite a bunch of ways of doing this. And it really depends on what kind of shape you also want to give here. And now you can see we do have a lot more definition here, even though we're not really having this obvious kind of light, right? And the thing is, I mean, if you would want to, you could always get that really obvious kind of light here in the back as well. So that is totally something that you can do if you would want to. And it all depends on our positioning here. So you could do something more like this. I need to be careful here what happens with our shadows. So this is stuff that I don't like, but obviously can do it. You can also, of course, go like, full on, like Hollywood mode, you know, do something like this. It doesn't really look bad. It's just that I don't really like it too much. So usually what I would then suggest here is, like, really tone it down, and I mean, like, a lot, right? Like, have it. So it's not like super in your face that it's there. Like, very, very subtle, right? This just like it gives volume and, like, something to the hair. So this is something where I think, like you see what it does. So this really helps. And now imagine she would actually look at us. It would be quite nice in this way. So this is definitely a good way of you know, trying to do something like this, where you get some really nice portrait lighting, something really good look in here. You can, of course, do a few other things as well. So if I take this and I unlock this, and I'll copy this. And let's pile it here. And let's flip this again to, like, 36 and 24. I really need to slow down this movement here. Well, let's really focus on the eyes here. So this way, we have a total focus on the face, right? And I think that something like this would work better with a different focal length. So let's do this. So I think that this works a lot better. So this is kind of neat. And then you can obviously do so many different things here. And if we just turn all these off and we add our viewport, and I think this is the correct one, but, of course, I don't see anything. Where's my my girl here. There we go. So you can do some really, really cool stuff here. So, for example, oops, that was not what I wanted. I should look this. So let's just keep this. Which was, like, sort of more like a lucky accident. And then do our trace shadows here. And like, just doing something like this, you know, like it kind of looks so awkward, but it also has some really cool interest. It could be like something proper from, like, a movie or something, and I haven't even, like, changed anything here. Get this more Chris. I actually did like it this way. And then, you know, like, whatever So we could do something like this. Like, even something like this. Like, look at this. This is like, sort of like if the floor would be lit by, like some lit panels. So this is actually quite cool. So you can do a lot of interesting things here for lighting a character in a more cinematic way. Let's add I want to really add some, like, red or orange to this. So again, I'm just gonna duplicate this again. L rotate this and bring it into the bag. Something like this. Which always works because this is so cold here, so this is the classic Hollywood contrast. And, you know, fooling around with these things is a lot of fun. So we can just, like, make this a bit smaller here and create some sharpness. And depending on where we move this, of course, we'll have different effects here. But, yeah, I think this looks pretty cool, obviously. So we could do a really fun exercise here and just go into our post process volume, go in here and crank this up and go into this guy and boost this and then go into our film grain. Go here. And then, of course, like, apply similar things as what we did before. Or I tweak this quite a bit and give this like a more cinematic look. So there's so many things that are really fun to try out with this. But, you know, the world is your oyster, and this could be really fun to do something like this. And then when you have that, you can also, then as another thing, do a simullighting setup for the full character, right? So there's all these different ways when I said this could be some panels on the floor. You can just build a floor mesh with some illuminating panels, put the lights there and make it feel like the character is in some kind of setup like this. So you can do so many things here. And sometimes it's also really good to keep the shadows dark because it, like, looks more cinematic. But again, you can totally do it the other way around as we did before. Just turn all these off. And this one, too. And instead, just do what we had here with the sliding setup and the other camera. So again, a lot of choices here to make something that you really like. And of course, you can also always just, play around with these colors and try to do something cool. See what happens when you tone this down quite a lot. See what happens when you just give some color to this, like, so or again, make it a lot darker. You can see now this just has a more mysterious mood, just a bit of a different flavor. I think this is important to also try out what you like the most, how you feel it's great. It doesn't always need to be super high gloss stuff. But then again, if you want that, that is also great. There's no way to hold you back from doing these things. This is usually how I would approach some nice character lighting. And I'll see you in the next lesson where we do one more thing regarding characters, that's a bit more freaky. So I hope you all enjoyed this and had a good time. Thanks for watching. See you in the next lesson. 15. Rendering Abstract Characters: Hello, and welcome to the next lesson. I will call this a little bit of bonus and fun episode regarding the character lighting because I thought, Hey, let's do just something where I'm just also just going to freestyle a little bit and trying to get something cool that is not as photographic in that sense as what we did before, but more like you know, let's be a little bit creative and try something cool and I'll bring you along on the journey, if that makes sense. So what I will be using here is the Paragon Shinbi character, which is free. So, there's no no limits here. Everybody can get it. That's cool. I will go with the emote piece, I think. This is pretty cool. When you have these characters, you can just drag in the animation sequence and then of course, this does not really look like piece. The trick here is to go into the initial position and you can slide through the animation here and see what you like. And so let's do this. I know that we don't have these clothes here physicalized, which is a bit, you know, it is what it is. But I think it's still kind of cool. So let's do something fun with this because this fits a lot more to what I was talking before when we looked at different character renderings with different styles and all that kind of stuff. So let's see what we can build here with this. And I will first of all, delete the sky atmosphere. I will delete the skylight. I will delete the sky sphere and the clouds. And I will keep the floor for now, and I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to do here. So I think the first thing that I will do is I will start with a camera and just try to sort of frame this lady in a cool way that I kind of like. So let's see what we can get here. So I do think that I probably want a flip format. So again, I'm going to go to full frame DSLR. I'm going to do 24 and 36, kind of like this. And I just need to see what I kind of like here. So I will be opening this up in a second view port. And you know, actually, I will bring back the skylight here. And I will put something in there just so I don't have all these black shadows and stuff. So I'm going to go with you all know the one. It's this one here. And it adds a nice little, like, highlight stuff. And it also completely borks the hair shader, which is always great. Anyhow, so like, now I'm going to try to find something that I kind of do like. And it's always fun to well, first of all, let's look at our lens here. I no, actually, let's go with something really low. Let's go with a 30 millimeter. And let's see what happens when we do something like z. So now I'm going to do something really blasphemous. I will probably do this. So I get something, and I might, like, crop it later, depending on what I feel like. So This is kind of cool. However, let's No. Did like this more. Let's go in here and bring our focus to this lady's face. Kind of like this. So now let's see. Well, first of all, I'm just going to First of all, I'm gonna lock the camera, so I don't get any problems here. And there's a square here. So this is, like, the perfect Instagram format. Where is my sunlight? There we go. Alright, let's bring this down here so we can sort of access it inside of our shot. I'm not really sure if I really want to go with the sunlight, but we'll see. So this is all up for debate here. There's no clear thing just yet. But I'm just figuring out certain things. So sometimes it can actually work to use the sunlight as well. So there's no real issue in that. But we can see that we have a precision issue, which is not that great. So let's try something. And by precision issue, I mean, that the shadows are working out. So let's do retrace shadows. And now we can see that we get, like, a lot clearer stuff here. So I am actually gonna turn this off for now. And what I will be doing is I will be bringing in my little friend here. I'm going to go out of this. What I want to try is I want to try and see what happens when I give her some really cool back light there. But look at these sweet ray trace shadows here or not ray trace, but that's the lumen contact thing here. That looks really, really sweet, I have to say. Anyhow, let's go in here to my favorite friend, the rectangular light. So this is where it's at, right? So now we can actually turn off the skylight too because I kind of want to sculpt out something nice here. I just want to see. So this is going to be the key light here for this, like, really nice highlight. I'm going to do like this. And then I will bring this over here. And you may think, like, what the hell. But that's okay. You're free to think that. So I'm going to soften this out quite a bit. And I will be bringing this down. All right. And I'm not really worried about colors just yet. So right now I'm just, like, trying to find some good ways here for how the character can be lit. So I don't really care about what color any of these lights have. So I'm getting some nice highlights on the materials. So what I don't really get here right now is any proper reflections on the face, but we'll get there. So I'm going to just go out of this again, bring this back in here. And now what I will be doing is Oops I'm going to copy this. And now the idea is to see if we can actually get a bit of a sporty rim somewhere here on her. And to see what I'm doing, I will actually, add another color now because I need to sort of, like, really see the effect of what I'm doing. And if it's all the same light color, it's a bit hard to judge sometimes. And I do have a bit of a problem here with the hair and the ring. So that is not necessarily working in my favor here. So this is doing something quite nice, though. So now we do actually get this really nice rim light here. So we can't really do much about the hair shader. That's sadly the way it is. Also, I'm not entirely sure if we do have some lot controls here. Let's have a quick look. Yeah, so this seems forced here anyways. Let's make sure that we're on cinematic, so that's great. So now here's what I would like to do. I want to create a very reflective floor for her. So I'm just going to do this in here. Okay. Let's just go in here and do this, convert to perimeter, color, all God, put that in. At the roughness. And I think that's kind of it. We don't really need more, but I will obviously adjust this. So I'm just going to put this on the floor, and I will turn this off, and now we can see we do get some reflections here. However, let's actually add our post process volume because right now we don't have any control here over anything, which is obviously not that great. Move that out of the way. So let's apply this. Let's go into our exposure. And let's just use this here to sort of make this happen the way we want to. And now, what I think we should also do is switch to tracing because this will help us here with the contact reflections, right? And I will definitely try to choose a different color here for the floor. So let's see how we're going to be doing with this. Now I want to add a exponential height fog. And this is going to be a fun little test here. I'm going to turn on the olometricFog. And then I want I'm just going to try something now. So this is like I have no idea if this is going to do what I want. So put this slide in here and go to Vollometric scattering intensity and set this to 50. And absolutely nothing is happening This is just bloom. Why is nothing happening? Oh, shoot. So this. What did I turn on? Huh. Anyways. So the idea here is to actually have very low scattering on the fog. But a lot on this one here. And first thing I want to do is I want to increase the source radius so you can see the reflection down here, right? So you can see this. I can soften this as well. So let's just keep this as it is for now. And I kind of don't want her to be really hit much by the light. So let's see about this. And then we can sort of start creating something here where, you know, we kind of, like, create this nice gradient. And if I don't want the floor to be affected so much by the specular, what I can do is in the advanced tab, there is the specular scale. I can just kind of move it down, as you can see. And what I can also do is I can make this light have not a lot of effect here like this and then just crank the scattering even more so I get the scattering sort of back. But I don't really have a lot of effect from the light itself. So this way, I can sort of orchestrate an effect like this. All right. So now looking at my light source here, let's see if I actually want to change this. All right. So we got this one. Let's see how we feel about this one over here. All right. And now what we're going to do now I am gonna add another light here. And I will choose a rectangular light. That's fine. And this one's going to be an interesting one. This one is going to be our highlight light, so to speak. And now this is going to get really, like, tricky almost because we need to be very careful how we place it. And you'll see in a second what I'm trying to do here. So first of all, I'm going to make this really small let's see. So I can focus the barn doors here so you can see what happens when I do that, right? So we haven't used the barn doors before because we didn't care too much. So the thing is, like, this way, the light basically emits in like 180 degree angle. But with the barn doors, I can start focusing it. And the thing is, I don't want this to be like everywhere, right? I want this to be rather specific. And also, I don't want this to do any volumetrics. So I'm going to put this to zero. And now I'm going to put this to one. And so now an important thing here, I will need to make this a lot bigger. And so what I'm trying to do here is so I want to catch some highlight on her eyes with this light. And and I might need to make this bigger so I can properly see this. So I will need to quickly switch here to off screen and changing my camera because I need to basically what I need to do is I'll show you. So, I need to get in here, like, really, like, rather close. And you can see that I will get some reflection from the other one. But let's uh change this a bit here. I need to sort of find a way to make this other light show up here. Let's make this a bit bigger. Oops. And it's really hard actually to get it to show up. This is very interesting. This is good. Let me try something quickly. This is a bit interesting why I'm not getting any proper reflection at all from this slide. Okay. So here, now I'm starting to get something, if you can see this. So here's the reflection of the light. But this is rather interesting because basically what I'm trying to do to give you some context, I want to have the eyes be a bit more like alive by having some kind of reflection in there. Hello. Show me reflection, girl. This is really fascinating here. And we do see we have a little bit over here. So it's not that, these reflections are completely invisible. But I have, honestly, I don't really know why it's not working the way it's supposed to. But one thing, and I don't like saying this, but I did have issues before with the Paragon characters behaving weird in some ways when I tried doing some things. So I don't know if that is the case here, but it is a little bit fishy that I'm perfectly on the hight here, and I'm not really getting anything in terms of specular response on the eyes, even though, as you can see, I'm obviously fully there But no, ****. Did I copy the other light? Okay. 1 second. Did I copy the other light? No, because here we got the spec. I thought like, Oh my God, if I copied the other light with no spec, that would have been a complete failure. But then again, that also was a point line. This is really unfortunate because you can see here, this one definitely has specular response. If I go into this, you can see that this definitely does show up. But, well, it is what it is. So it's not too bad. So, yeah, I mean, you know, I was just trying to do, like, this fun little exercise here. Let's, uh, look at this, and so what I want to do here is basically, if you look at this. So this is what it looks like, but it makes her skin also look a little bit dead. So I'm trying to just softly, you see this, slide this in and just give her a little bit more of a skin tone, a proper skin tone. So I think this works quite well. I'm not sure if I should make this brighter. Yeah, maybe like this. I think that works. So I'm going to look again at the color of the floor, and I'm just thinking, should we go darker here? I think we should do this because we want the character to stand out and we also want to create this sort of gradient here, right? So, we got this. Let's see if I move a bit closer here. So we can see that, like, now she gets, like, really fogged. We don't really want that. So we want her to be rather clear. But I also want this to be kind of like this. So I want this to be behind her, sort of like this. And I think this is actually quite cool. So again, this is just really a huge freestyle here. But this is something where you can do a bit more of a cooler character presentation this way. Again, the hair here is not ideal. It is a bit problematic. But there's not really much that we can do. The hair in general is a bit like but I do think this adds nicely. And then to also strengthen the effect, of course, I mean, I just always switch to convolution, make stuff better anyways. And we always can add a bunch of things if we would want to. So definitely go and play with the vignette to increase the focus on the character here. We could also go into the camera quickly and maybe just try to very carefully do something like this, like to have, more of the reflection visible and have her fill out the space a bit more. So there's definitely a few things that can be done maybe not go as crazy here, something like this. So, you know, this is just like a little fun thing to do. So it's really straightforward. So when you do stuff like this, the way I approach it is you always want to have, like, a key light. You want to have a slight fill that just gives, like, you know, so stuff is not too dark. And then you can add, like an accent highlight. But I would also be very careful to not have a lot of lights because, again, it just becomes hard to manage, and it doesn't always work super well. So I think also here, keeping it simple is sort of like key and I don't actually know if like, even like this, you know, it works. So we can do stuff like this. I'm just gonna see do I have them? Then we're gone. Where is it? Where are my, there we go. So if we look at this, something simple that we can do here. And there's probably a bunch of other ways of, like, going in. So we could also reframe this a little bit, right? And again, this is just like the hair is it's really annoying, I have to say, but it is what it is. Not much we can do about that. And if you look at stuff like this, you would obviously want to, like, change some of the lighting here. I mean, it could also be a cool thing to try when let's do something here. Oh. You know, we could just rotate her. So if you're doing a shot like from this side, and let's focus on her eye here. But you see, we get a lot of issues with the hair, but I think it's kind of it's kind of cool, though. And actually, it does look kind of cool here, too. So these eyes, though, I think something is weird with the eye material. But again, like, there's a lot of cool stuff. So I actually want to okay, so let me fix this. I take the girl and let's rotate her back like this. Like this. I just want to quickly take a shot here. Boom. And then Oops, wrong one. So this looks kind of cool, too. So So, yeah, you know, this is just sort of having fun, trying cool things and abusing volumetric fog for some gradients and some lighting and stuff. So this is definitely more like the stylized lighting that you would see in a presentation for, like, Hey, I made an overwatch character or stuff like that. But one thing that is really interesting as well is so what you can do is you can do this here, include buffer visualization targets, and then click this to write them in HDR. And what you're going to get is you're going to get the depth buffer, for example. And you can use the depth buffer to mask out the character and put them on a different background and stuff like that in Photoshop, like if you would want to. So there's a bunch of cool things if you want to create a unique scene composition that is not inside of Unreal. But, yeah, this was the little character bonus session here. I hope everybody enjoyed it. Thank you so much for watching. And then, of course, see you in the next lesson. 16. Lighting Large Environments Part1 - Exterior: Hello and welcome to the next lesson in our little series here. So today is the time where we actually start digging really into some good stuff here. So before we go to do that, I just want to give a huge shout out to our sponsors because wanting to work on these things, it is really important to have proper environments, proper content to actually do all the things that we would like to do. So our first sponsor is Real biomes, and it's this one here. So this is the exterior that we will be working with. Then we have Reno's Diner from Dicogon Studios, which is used for the interior space that we have. We have Rosie's restaurants Diner from solo mode, which is the exterior that we use for the diner building. And then we also have the Desert gas station by Joachim Dixon. So huge shoutout big thanks to sponsoring this content for us to work with. And this is the scene here. So we have a really nice and big open environment to do as we please with, and we do have the two buildings down here. So we have the gas station with the car. And we do have the diner with the interior here. And right now, this is a little bit, like all over the place, which is to be expected because I did go in and just, like, delete a bunch of things as well, mostly in terms of the lighting. So what we need to do is we need to just, like, step by step, start sort of rebuilding what we actually want here. But before we really worry about any of these interior spaces and all that, the first thing that we kind of need to do is we just really need to do what I call like an analysis pass. So this is usually, one of the most important things, and it will help you down the line to make sure that everything works in a consistent way. So one of the biggest tips in that sense that I can give to anybody is, like, if you work with bought content, like marketplace content or even with your own content, I think it's always really, really important before you start the actual lighting work to do, like, a quick sanity check on everything, you know, like, make sure that everything is a clean base to start building on. And one thing that is really important in here, and we haven't really talked about this much before because we did, like, the portfolio rendering stuff and all these kinds of things. However, working with a proper environment now, all these things become a lot more important. So what am I talking about here? So this has been really important with static baked lighting as well. It was not as important with dynamic lighting before in Unreal because Unreal did not really have real time global illumination. However, now that we have it with Lumen, it changes the things quite drastically. And what I'm talking about here is diffuse color or base color balancing. Because we have to understand that based on the color an object has, the way it reflects the lighting, it varies a lot. And not only do we need to make sure that our materials are physically plausible, but we also need to make sure that we have enough range in our colors, so we can sculpt the lighting nicely and we also have some room for some potential color grading on top. And there is a bunch of things that are quite interesting. For example, there are from a physically based rendering point of view, values that are just impossible. Like we call them physically impossible, and that is pure black and pure white. There is really nothing. And let's not start a discussion about antablack here. But there is there's no real materials that are pure black or pure white. Like, even if you expose it correctly and if you measure it, like, even snow is not pure white. So snow is actually one of the whitest materials that we know. One of the darkest is charcoal, and both of them are neither full black nor full white. So that is one important thing to know because every material that we have in our life, it does reflect and bounce light. So if you make something in your game engine or wherever and you make it full black, it means that it bounces absolutely no light, and that is just not possible. And the same goes for white, which means it bounces like everything 100%, which also doesn't really happen. So that's one thing. But another thing, and then we can use the buffer visualization here and go into base color. Another thing is that you kind of want values to be really, like, balanced and mostly rather flat because you want the lighting to add the variation and the spice and all that. And here, for example, this is quite great because we can see that overall, everything is rather low contrast, but we do have a little bit of, like, the reds here. They pop quite well. But it is not super extreme. And if we look at this stuff here, we can also see that this is everything is rather flat. And if we look at this texture information, it is rather flat. And to be honest, this is exactly what you want. Like here, you don't want 1 million of detail in your base color textures. Kind of just want this to come from all the different texture maps that work together to create something good. Now, you may say, like, Oh, but there's quite some dark spots up here. And if I do remember correctly, this is actually wetness here. So I think there is some sort of, like, Yeah, we can see it. I think it's a little bit unfitting here to have this wetness. But the funny thing is not sure if you have seen it, but there is the Australia content in the marketplace. Just going to pick this up here quickly. So it's this one. And this one is actually from a good friend of mine, Andrew. He used to be my art director on Star Wars, and he has these cliffs here like these cliffs. And he uses these wetness masks because there is a river and it fits the environment and all that kind of stuff. And the funny thing is, like, this guy, he is really, really good at what he does. And this content pack is one of the best examples, and it's free, so that's great. It's one of the best examples how to balance your textures, how to set up content and all that, because this guy he really knows how to do it. And it is a lot of these concepts that are in here is how we did things on Star Wars, as well. And the funny thing is that I went through this environment and the way that some of these objects are set up, the way that the textures are balanced, it is exactly how the rural Australia content has been built, which is not a bad thing. It's a good thing because that is sort of like how you should do it. It was just a little bit funny to me to see this because it's the same kind of wetness effect that Andrew had used in his stuff, too, and I was like, when I saw it, I was like, okay, I know this. I know this. So coming back to the colors here, when you have something that is wet, the diffuse usually gets darkened. So that is why you have this more contrast here. And that is fine. But again, overall, everything is rather flat, and that is what you want to because when Epic did the valley of the ancient stuff, they had a little production breakdown from it as well. And they said that some of the megascan textures, for example, they were not balanced as well as they could have been. So they actually had, like, issues where the GI, for example, was too weak or it wasn't like saturated enough. So they had to revisit their content with the new technology available to make sure that it actually works and looks the way it does, so they had to fix it via texture balancing. And that is something that is just really important to know. When you work with your lighting setups, you really want to make sure that your textures are all well balanced. Everything is working the way it should, so that it works well. And just looking at this quickly, again, I think this is great. This works well. There are some values that are on the darker side, but then again, they're also, like, rather dark materials. And one really good tip that I can give to everybody is, like, if you don't know just basically take your textures, do a quick, snip here, and then put them into Photoshop and use the histogram analysis to just see where you are. So in like this case here, for example, you know, just like, take the snipping tool, snip it, copy it, and then just go Photoshop. Paste this in. And now, if you go here to the histogram, you just go to luminosity and you can see that we have a mean of 212 median of 214. And that is rather bright, which this is. So this is something where we say, like, Yep, that's fine. So for darker stuff or medium stuff, you kind of want to be around 100. This is not scientifically proven or anything. This is just something that based on my experience, I have isolated as a decent value. So let's just have a look here. This is probably a bit on the darker side. But let's see what we get here. So this is 120, and this is great. This is absolutely great because you have to see, 128 is sort of like medium gray. And personally, I balance a lot of my materials that are more on the darker side around like 100 to 110. So this is absolutely perfect because it will give us a lot of bound sliding. We have some decent saturation going on here. And the problem is that if you would download a material like this from mega scans, for example, like, a lot of the times, not always, but a lot of the times you kind of get something more like this. And you can see that we're like on 75. 75 is really dark. It means that there will not be a lot of bounds from it and all those kind of things. So this is just something where I do my sanity checks. And again, there will be a lot of materials that are potentially around 85 or 95. But I think around 100 is usually the sweet spot for me, even though if a material seems rather dark. And I think this is quite interesting looking at this because it does not look like super bright here either, right? So it feels dark in comparison to a lot of these, but it is not too dark, like, by no means, and we have a good overall value. This one, probably different story. I would assume that it's more like around 80 or 70. So let's just see. But then again, these materials, like, it's just, like, roof thing that they have to, like, Like I think it has, like, tar in it or something as well. And they use, like, a burner to put it onto the roofs, I think. Are we? In this. Yeah. So here we like 97, so still very, very good. And for comparison on Star Wars, the texture balancing for Darth Vader was 53 in the median. So if I put this here, you can see, now we're at 60, and I'm just going to put this down a bit more. So this is basically the full black of dothwer it doesn't look full black in the texture, but we need to have some sort of information to have it represent properly. And then we also had some decent tone mapping on top of it, so that is why he looks really nice and black. But overall, we can say this is some working texture balancing here. Same goes for this, none of this is really too dark here. So that's right. I want to quickly check this value here just so I can be sure in what kind of range we are here. And and maybe we will look at it, alter it a bit. We'll see. So here again, so this is 110. This is great. So it really sometimes our brain gets fooled by, in this case, the fact that everything else is so bright. So it's not necessarily that this is so dark, but all this stuff is just really bright. And that's okay. So we just need to double check because, again, like I said, our brains, they can get fooled by this, and then we just don't really know. So always good to double check. Now, with that sort of out of the way, what I would like to do is, I would like to just really do a clean slate for this. So I'm going to clean this up and say, Y I have really nothing in here, so I can do whatever I want to make this work. So let's go and check and first of all, I will completely delete the post process volume. If it. Cool. So going to get rid of the post process volume here to make sure that there are no, like, settings that I don't like or like, basically saying this is quicker than going through the post process volume and just, like, turning everything off that has been set before or, like, something like that. Because, I don't know. So let's make sure that this works the way it should. Then let's see what type of fog we have in here. So we do have an atmospheric fog. We have an exponential height fog. And for now, I'm just making sure that the atmospheric fog uses default settings here, and I will turn it off and you can see how it has quite an effect, not only on the clarity of our skybox, but also just like everything sort of it affects the colors. So we can see here, if we turn it off, for example, right, like, our sky becomes a lot more blue, and the same happens to our GI as well. And when we do this, it fades it a bit. So it does also have quite a significant effect here on our lighting. So I'm going to turn this off. I have the exponential height fog here. We're using volumetric fog. Not a lot is happening. And we're just going to turn this off as well. And we can actually see that. It is tweaked in a way here where there's not a lot happening. So again, just making sure we have a clean slate here. We go into our directional light. We are movable. We are on nine Lux because this project has not been set up to use physical values. However, I did set it to the EV 100 stuff already, like the extended luminosity luminance range in the project settings. So it is set up in a way that we can start using physical values, which we will be doing. I'm going to delete this though. And just start all over. Then we have our sky here. And this is interesting. I'm going to delete this. Here we have our skylight, set to movable, capture scene. There's like some color set up here. Now, it has recaptured with a black sky, so that is what is happening here. It's a bit interesting why we still have this glow. A. Very interesting. Oh, I think it was. Well, in any case, it will be fixed rather soon. So this is just like stuff where I sometimes don't know what is happening because this was not something that happened in Unreal four. In Unreal four, because there seems to be like some still cached lighting from Lumen or something. So like, you can see when I turn it off, it just really goes away. And when I turn it back on, it kind of, like, comes back. So looking at this, let's see how we do this. So I have a material here, which is my sky master material. I will create an instance of screen for this. And then classic move, as always, I will go into the engine content. I will type sphere. I will grab my editor sphere here. And then let's turn off all the shadow casting. I'm going to apply my sky material here, and we can see beautiful emissive light source. And it's scaled us to 15,000. And now we can see that we have this sort of thing here. And now what I need to do is I need to recapture my skylight. So we have something where the exposure starts matching because we had our bottom information was almost black and we had the bright sky. So that is something to remember. So now we have this. And like I mentioned before, I really do like to just always start with my sky. And here we have a sun in here. So sometimes I actually put this into Photoshop and I edit the sun disc out because this is a very strong light source as well. So there is definitely a sort of directionality from the light that is quite strong when we do this. So it can help to edit it out and then, use the atmospheric fog to basically render a sun disk on top of this. But again, there's many ways to do this. I will just put this up here. And here we can see that we have this lower hemisphere color set. And I will make this black so we don't have any interference. And this does not really matter because what this does is that basically, none of this stuff from here, because if I would turn it off, we would get this stuff as lighting information as well. I don't want anything to leak, and locally speaking, everything will get replaced with the local bounds anyways because we have lumen. Before we had lumen, we could use this to fake bounce lighting and stuff like that. But we don't need to do that. So I just want that all the lighting information from the bottom is sort of like erased to not cause any problems. So now I haven't really decided how I want to rotate the sky. And this depends a little bit, because as you can see, we do have a sun here. So the idea now would be to just bring in a sunlight because what we need to do is we need to sort of make it aligned with the actual sun position here. We can have it, like, a little bit lower potentially, just a tiny little bit, but we still need to see from where it should come, and then we will rotate the sky accordingly to match it up. So let's get ourselves a sun here. Beautiful. And what I'm doing right now is I'm just seeing where the sun also would hit the interior. And I'm kind of curious about this glass here. Because it kind of seems almost like the sun is not really going into the building here, which could be something with the material setup or with the angle. So let's just see what happens here. Like, I would love something that looks great outside, but also it would be kind of neat to get a little bit of lighting to, like, hit inside here. So we have something here, but, like, it's probably the angle still that is not yet fully there. So let's see here. Yeah. So it was still just shadow casting. But again, we can't really make it too low because our sun is not that low, so we need to sort of find, like, a bit of a compromise here. But I think I do kind of like this where we have a bit of it exposed. It's not all in shadow. And we are actually automatically pretty aligned with this. I think we would need to rotate it just a slight a tiny little bit to the left, like a very tiny little bit. So what I'm using here now is I'm using the arrow from the sun actor to see how aligned it is. And we can see if I basically center myself in a way where like this overlaps perfectly here, we can see that we are still a tiny little bit off here. So something more like this. I think this works. Looks good. So this is the first thing that we do, right? Just throw these in. And now, what I want to do is I kind of want to balance this out really, really well. So you can see here that my brightness is one, which is obviously not the physically plausible values that we usually go with. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go for this sphere again here. Drag the editorsphere in. And then let's see if I can find something for quick debugging. Yeah, let's use this one. It should be fine. All right. So now we have the gray material here, okay? And what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag this out of it because I don't want to get too much like, bound slide from the ground or something. I want this to be, like, yeah, rather neutral. So now let's start this with the physical values quickly and just make a super basic setup for this. So this sun is even though my shadows are not 12:00, like, this is I don't know, maybe like 130 or something like that. It's a bit hard to say. But let's say it's like 130. So and this is a desert environment, right? So we have a very strong sun here in a scenario like this. So if I go in here, actually set this to movable, and now with this secu movable, let's go down here. And let's say that we are at 100,000 locks. Now, this happens, right? And we obviously get a lot of issues here. So before we continue, let's just quickly add a post process volume and just super quickly lock something in so it doesn't completely fall apart here. So do it infinite extent, go to exposure, have this set. And then, like, I don't know, like 14 or something. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to show the visualized HDRI adaption, and now we're going to do the thing where we balance the stops. So we can see here we have 15 pretty much clean. And here we have like nine. And remember, when we looked at this, I said that you want to have four to one ratio sort of of sun versus sky with a scenario like this. So that means that we need to sort of go to 11 here. And to do that, I will bring out the instance. Oops. Now I'm just putting in something so I can see stuff here. You can see this obviously still looks rather dark. What we need to do now is I'm using this one here. It should be build reflection captures. I think it actually did rebuild the sky, but let's continue here. So you can see now how the skylight has updated, and we're on 11.4. So we have 11.4, and we have 15.2 here. So I say that this is probably rather good in terms of balance. What's the wrong one. Here. So let's go in here, turn that off. So now we have our first, like, balance set. However, I think we can still pump this a bit here. So what I would like to do is I would go into my post process volume. And instead of changing these to 13, I'll just do this. And now we also get this hot feeling back, right? So we do have some really pleasing values, and we have a good ratio overall as well. So let's quickly look here. Oops. All right. I just want to make sure that we have the virtual shadow map turned on. Yes, good stuff. So now what we can do is we can actually if you want the shadows to feather a bit more, we can do that via the source angle. So if we look at this here, you can see how the shadows get a bit softer. So kind of like this, I think this is nice. Yep. This works well. So now we kind of have our first basic, really super basic setup here then. And now what we can do is I did not delete this. I will let's just bring in a basic height fog here. And now you can see that we get this darkening again. And this is, of course, because our fog itself is way too dark. So, the height fog is not physically accurate. It's like an additive color that is being added to the scene and all that. So this color is just no matter what you said it to even if I said it to white, like, you don't really see it because it's kind of like like, this is like the brightness 0-1, but we are in a brightness that is way, way, way higher, like hundreds or something because of the physical values. So what we need to do is, like, let's say we want the fog to be like this color, and now we need to do like maybe 200 here. You see it just got brighter. Let's do 1,000. So there we go. So here we start getting something. It sadly resets when we touch these. So it's a bit annoying. And this is obviously why did it. Okay, I have to hit Enter first before it kind of respects it. So not saying this is beautiful at all. We need to change this a bit. So now we can use the sliders here to actually affect this, and the brightness stays mostly the same here. So we can set up something here that works rather well. Maybe like this, gives it a bit of this dusty feeling. Let's not oversaturate it. That makes it look really weird. Just like a tiny little bit. And oh like this. And this way, we have our first way of setting this up. And this is just really the initial basic thing here. And from that on, we can then continue. And you can also see that with these values, it is very dark in here. And this is completely expected. This is totally normal because we will need to define exposure zones for, like, these things where we have interior exterior lighting mixed. So we're going to start ironing out these kings over time. So that's it for the basic initial setup in this session. Thank you so much for watching. And let's continue this with the next session and do a bit more polish on this and also start having a look at the interior and different values there. So, see you in the next lesson. 17. Lighting Large Environments Part2 - Exterior: Hello and welcome to the next session of our nice exterior desert environment here. So last time we did a really straightforward basic setup, and we can look at this, and, you know, it's kind of like, okay, ish, but still it's a bit simple and all of that. So one of the first things that I want to do now is I want to work a little bit more with the actual atmosphere here. Last time we added the height fog, which emulates a little bit this kind of dustiness. But again, it is not really what gives us the proper atmosphere. And I guess you may have noticed that I so far did not use the sky atmosphere because the sky atmosphere, it is used together with the volumetric clouds and all that kind of stuff. And while it is really cool, especially if you want to have time of day or stuff like that, I do sometimes really prefer having the control with, like, a static image. Like, it gives me a lot more control and also a lot more realistic look with the cloud scapes and all these kinds of things. So what I want to do next is I want to actually turn off our exponential height fog here. For now at least. So we turned this off. And also what you just saw here, I can't stress it enough, but it is rather important, which is, like, sometimes you think that your stuff is not readable enough, and then you might make it too bright, and then you add the fog and like the fog just increases the layering and the readability. So it is not always maybe the ideal way to combat these things with just like adding more lighting per se. So yeah, generally speaking, it can just really help a lot to work with proper fog here. Let's turn this one off. Now we have our atmospheric fog here, which at the moment is turned off. Generally speaking, the atmospheric fog is not designed necessarily to work with a static sky sphere because if we just look at this, of course, there is some background stuff here. But here you can see we do like this, what we see in the texture is basically the atmospheric scattering over distance. So we get like particles in the air, occluding the clouds here and all these kind of things. And this is stuff that the atmospheric fog does as well. So we need to be a bit careful when we try to blend them together. So I can turn this on and you can instantly see how it does affect everything and how it also sort of, like, almost, like, takes a bit away from the sky. So we definitely lose some intensity here in our values. However, we do gain some way better layering when looking at the distance and how we just get the mountains in the back blending in. I am a little bit surprised, I have to say, because I don't use the atmospheric fog a lot, but I do think this is a very interesting shift here in color intensity, nevertheless. So what we also need to make sure is that when we look at our directional light, we definitely want that it's set to being an atmosphere sunlight because if we don't have that, it's like the fog is basically not really doing anything. So even if we look in the back over here, it's like when I turn this off, it is like the fog is basically invisible. So we definitely want this to be on. And then with these settings here. So these are rather interesting. So first of all, a lot of these settings are very, let's say, scientific in a certain way. So it is not really that smart to go completely haywire with them. I mean, you can use them if you want to emulate the atmosphere of mars, let's say, and you can change settings. You can change the planetary radius, a lot of these things. But you know, like, it's not always what you kind of want to do. So we got to be a bit careful with these settings. So I have mentioned it already, but I have to admit I'm not a super huge pro with the atmospheric fog because again, like I said, I usually don't use it much. I have used it in the past, many, many years ago, when, like, these days, I don't work with Unreal anymore for professional work, but I used to work in Unreal for professional work, and I used it back then. So I am a little bit rusty, but I think it's also fun to, like, explore these things together. So first of all, I think that we can actually use this potentially to see if we can limit our effect here where you can see how we cover the sky and we still see it back in the mountains there. So our default value here is 60. So let's try 25. We're still having a lot of sky. Let's try ten, still a lot of sky, five. Nice getting better, three, better, two, better. So now we actually restored some of the sky while we still have our nice, like distance rendering there. And this is something that I like doing because it will give me back some of my sky values because we just lowered the thickness of the atmosphere so you can see when I turn it on and off. The change is not as drastic anymore as before, but we still do get the nice distance bluning desaturation effect, so to speak. So that is definitely something that we can do and use to our advantage. So something else that we can actually try here we have a ground albedo, which is set to gray, and that might not actually be the best way to set this. So what we can try is we can go into our buffer re visualization here and let's go in here and let's just color pick something like this here. So now we have this value. And it does not have a super huge impact here. My can Io. Okay. Sometimes this is weird. It doesn't work the same, like you can't redo some of the things. But again, it's not a big change that we got here, but I just like to set it. Alright. So let's tweak this a bit further. This is not of importance to us right now. Here are a bunch of really interesting settings. We can just fool around with them. I wouldn't really change the color of the leigh scattering because this is, as we can see what gives the atmosphere the color. But as you see, we can thicken this the more scattering we have, the more almost post apocalyptic that starts feeling and also one interesting thing is, since we have set our sunlight to effect this, we can actually see that our sunlight is changing color as well. So it is basically they work together because we have so much scattering inside the atmosphere now. So this is kind of like what you can potentially do when you want to get a sandstorm or something. And let's actually try if the color here is affected by this. So what we're going to do is we're going to copy this value and we're going to change this, and we can see it did change a little bit here. So if I paste that back in, we can definitely see how this affects the scattering inside the atmosphere. And this is very interesting because when people want to do things like sandstorms or some really dusty environment and things like that, they quite often, like, for example, go really mental in the height fog, but that is actually the wrong way to do because the height fog, per se, is a completely fake technique that is sort of like additive on top of the scene. But then there's, of course, the vollometric, but the vollometric is just like a more how can I say it, a more up close representation of some of these effects. But when the wind really blows and it blows up all the dust into the atmosphere, this is what you actually get. It makes a lot of sense. Oh, this is fun. Sorry. Yes. I actually makes a lot of sense to reset this. God damn it. It makes a lot of sense to fool around with these values and see what you can actually get here. I need to look if I want to put this to two. Yeah, I do want to do that. So again, it absolutely fine to experiment with these. Then we have the me scattering here. And if we increase this, we get this sort of really strong scattering from the sun direction, and we can also see that it does thicken the atmosphere a bit. If I do this really strongly, we get overcast, and it's beautiful here as well, because you can see how this completely kills the shadows and everything. So we just basically generated overcast by having loads and loads of particles here inside our atmosphere. And if I remember correctly, me scattering is water droplets, while leigh scattering is more like dust particles and stuff like that. So we can clearly see that this looks a lot more like water droplets or something like that. And the cool thing is that we can, of course, I'm just going to turn the fog back on quickly here. So, you know, we can emphasize this effect, and then we can turn on the volumetric fog. And for the volumetric fog, now we can see that we kind of have not really a lot up close here. So we could potentially go into our volumetric fog and start really cranking some of this. So you can see how we get a lot more here now, and it is a little bit blue because it still scatters some from the sky. So we can do something like this, which starts to become really eerie and pretty cool. We do have a bit of the wrong sky texture for stuff like this, though, but just saying that if we would now add some cool light here, we would need to crank this light a lot because we have this daytime setting right now with a very so basically, our exposure and everything does not match this environment right now. We would need to have a lot lower exposure to actually make this work properly. So I'm going to go with lumens right now, and I'm just going to set something like 15,000, 50,000 or 500,000 fine. So you can see that but we get some really nice, like scattering here. So if we just, like, put this somewhere here. And again, I'm just quickly fooling around here. This is not really representative of where this is going. So we could just, like, scale this up a bit and then make this warm. And then we can go into our volumetric scattering as well and just like So, like, you know, you could do some pretty cool stuff like this where it can quickly establish a mood. So let's get rid of this. Let's go into our atmospheric fog or first, actually, let's reset this, turn this off. So here we had army scattering. Then, of course, for artistic purposes, you can do all sorts of things. But this one is funny. So this here is actually not a color picker. Well, it is technically speaking, but you can see that these colors do not represent the look that we're getting. And the reason for that is that this is like some wavelength stuff here. So it doesn't actually mean that these are the color values that are being scattered in that sense. So it is a bit like you know, these values are more interpreted in a scientific way and less of an artist kind of way. So let's go back here. We also have absorption scale, which usually is not that useful. I mean, maybe it is if you want to make some kind of horror game where some mythical power sucks the light out of everything or something. I don't know. But usually, absorption scale, not that intensely useful, I would say. Actually, I assume that if we do this and then we touch this one, it is probably going to be the same thing again. It's like the colors work similar to the scattering, where it's more like a scientific way of interpreting these. I haven't really Oh, yeah. This is kind of like where the sun comes from. So it's like you can see it scatters more in. So you can tweak that here. Atmosphere, absorption scale. Honestly, no idea what that one does. And I don't even see, a lot of differences, but that could also be because we already tweaked our atmosphere height here. So and then we have some odd direction parameters here. So we can change some of the sky colors here. We don't see a lot of this right now. We see it maybe a bit in the back here because this is really the atmosphere. So now we're blocking it because of the sky sphere that we're having here. So if I go here and I turn that off, right? Like, this is the atmosphere that we're rendering right now. So you can see, there's a lot of lack of blue here, and that is because I dropped the height so much. So if I would put the height back up, there would be a lot more. So here you can sort of like art direct the sky and give it, like, different colors and stuff. Here, we can sort of, like, increase or decrease a little bit of the fogginess. So again, these also are not physically accurate. These are more like artist tweak parameters. Uh, which one is the good one? This one? And I'm obviously tweaking these now with our sky visible because I want to make sure that we get something that blends well. I don't really care too much about how it works with the proper sky, with the proper physical sky. That is actually not so much a concern for me right now. So we can look at this here, and I kind of do like a value that is maybe like two, just like a tiny little bit of fill here. No idea. Yeah. Okay. Okay, so we can remove it a bit from the foreground, which will make our sky more visible, but we still maintain it in the background here. I think something like this works quite well. So if we do this now, we can see This does a decent job here. Now the question is, of course, do we still want to touch some of these values here? For example, do we want to touch a bit of the leigh scattering? But it's almost like really touching the colors too much. I don't want to do this. This is not like Mars. So maybe we just want to do this. I did that made almost no difference. It's just a tiny, tiny little bit here. Then, of course, we're going to bring back this guy. And now we have made this incredibly washed out and dusty, and that could be absolutely something that we would like to do. So that is one way. And let's look at our post volume here and see if we also may want to adjust the exposure here slightly. This is not too bad. And let's go to our fog again. So now I want to look at this one again here. And I want to turn it a little bit more towards the red. And let's see if I saturate this tiny little bit more. So now we still have the density, but it's a little bit less washed out. So I actually do like this quite a bit. So now, one important thing that we kind of lost a bit because, if I'm going to go in here and turn this off, Oh, this is actually nice. Now since we remove the thickness of the atmosphere, we actually do maintain a little bit of the colors here. But one thing that I'm not particularly sure about when I look at this in lighting only, we can see that our shadows are actually quite blue, obviously, because here it's a bit different because we quite get a lot of bound sliding and so on. Here we can also again see there's a lot of warm bound sliding. But in here, the shadows are quite cool, which is pretty great. Okay. We don't see too much of it. So one thing that we could do now is we could go into our skylight in here. And what we can do is we can decide if we want to do some artist tweaks now, because this is basically a good general setup that we have. But we can also decide, like, Hey, you know, I kind of feel like I want to do some more artistic tweaks on some of the things here. So let's see if we like that more. So that is always something that I feel like it is not necessary, but you can always try and see if you do like something a little bit more because again, this is not the real world. It's like we want to get close to it, but sometimes it just makes sense to emphasize some things because it helps the brain a bit in a way of it's sort of like seen from that perspective, if that makes sense. So I am just adding a bit of blue here to my skylight. And if we look at this, for example, I'm going to copy this quickly. So here we have it, like, really warm. And he made it a bit cooler. And I think it sometimes can help to do that. Nice. And sometimes it can also help, if you want that to flatten the contrast a little bit. So because I don't want to make the sky brighter because I love that it's like so blue. So you can sometimes increase this a little bit, but I would always say, really don't do much more than two because you don't want to decouple the indirect lighting from the sky brightness too much. That is one of the reasons why I use this capture method where I capture the actual sky dome here because I just think that way, they are well connected and balanced, and it makes a lot of sense. But sometimes I also feel like, Yeah, maybe I would like to have just a little bit more. And then this can really help. So now one thing that we can see here, and that is something that I feel like a lot of people often forget or they just, like, potentially don't like, think about it in that way. And this is kind of like, so when I look at this, I think that something looks really off. Now you may ask yourself, well, what is that? And that is something where for me, at least, I say that teaching your brain how to see is very, very important. And one thing that I see is there's quite a lot of clouds in my sky. So what happens when there is a sun and there's clouds? Well, you end up with cloud shadows. And we can clearly see that we don't really have any cloud shadows here. So everything is kind of like naked and empty. What we can also see, I think, that is at least from my point of view, this one still doesn't blend in too well. So we'll have to give this a look. But for now, let's do some cloud shadows. And the way to do this is you can either use the sky atmosphere system and volumetric clouds and then use that or we can use a feature that we haven't looked at at all so far, but I think it's one of the coolest features inside of unreal and it is supported for pretty much all light types, but it behaves differently based on what type of light it is. So if you have a point light, it works different than when you have a spotlight, a rectangular light, or a directional light. It is not supported for skylights, but it doesn't make any sense to do so and you'll understand in a second why. So the feature that I'm talking about can be found down here and it's called a light function. And the light function is basically a material that has a black and white texture that imagine you cut out a paper and you put it in front of a flashlight and then it casts a shadow in that shape. So that is basically what a light function does. So what we can do is just trying to find my lighting folder here. What we can do is we can just create a new material and cloud shadows or one so we gonna open this? Here we have it. And then, luckily, the content that this seen here, it comes with a bunch of utility textures. So we can see there's a bunch of, like, generic noises and stuff like that. So I'm just going to use these. Like this stuff, you can make this yourself in Photoshop using the clouds filter at different sizes and adding and multiplying them together and just stuff like that. And then, like, you know, doing a bunch of level adjustments or whatever. So it's not really like black magic or anything. It's pretty straightforward. But for now, I'm just going to use what I have here. So let's build some very simple cloud shadows. So first of all, we're going to go into the material domain here, and if you don't have that, you may have selected something. Well, I don't have anything here. So if you select the root or click the background, you get this. So here, we're going to go to light function, and that makes it like this. So we have emissive color as the only input for now, which is great. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this texture here. And then what I'm also going to do is I'm going to take this texture here, and I will basically modulate them against each other. And one important thing is, like, you can make these cloud shadows so that they're like animated and they move I don't want to do it this time around, right now, I just want to orchestrate it more in a way where I'm like, Yeah, this is what I want. So I don't want these to change all the time, move around, but it's no problem to do any of that. So we need some texta coordinates. Then we go to add some multiplies. And then we have Cloud one scale. Let's just put this to one. And I'm going to call this texture cloud so I understand it better. And the other texture, I'm actually going to call it just noise. And now while I'm thinking, I actually think, let's do this differently. Let's do world position, and then we take a component mask. We mask RG, which means red and green channel, which is the same as U and V in that sense, and then we actually use the divide. It's like for like big stuff, this is a little bit better, in my opinion. Let's do it like this. Who. So we're going to put this in here and this in here. So let's start like previewing slash debugging this a little bit. So first of all, let's just go to plug this number one thing in here. And this looks pretty bork. And this is because it's like, super small. But that does not concern us right now. So just going to add this here. O All right. And now we can see it only made it darker. And the reason for that is because it's so small, there it is. So it's basically just like leaving no real room here. It's basically just like it was gray. But it doesn't really matter because we just can go in here and just, like, increase the scale, right? So now, I'm just increasing the scale of screen here. And this is kind of cool. Like this is, like, really, really kind of cool to create these pockets and it blends well with the shadows and everything. So this is actually really, really cool as a general thing. So now we kind of have this, and it's a little bit like kind of still too generic and repeating and also it's almost like the pockets are too small, it almost seems like it would need to be inverted. One thing that we can do is we can use one minus and we can actually just invert it. That's one thing that we can do. We use this and I'm going to move this away now if I hit save, we should get a shadow here. Exactly. So now we kind of have this, and it does already, like, look more like what we had here. So now I'm thinking, though, should we maybe change this a little bit, kind of like this so I think this is not too bad. However, we can still see that it's like, yeah, maybe like here up close, this is kind of cool. But it does not look too great when we look at the distance here. So what we can do is we can see if we can actually do something cool with this texture here. So let's just add a ad node. Let's add them together, and to be honest, I have no idea what's going to happen, but that's half of the fun. So nothing really has happened because our scale of the second texture is enormously small. I'm going to try and increase this, and now we can see what is actually happening here, right? So one thing that we could do now is I'm going to try and remove the one minus so we get more coverage again, like this. So this is kind of cool here. And now, what I'm going to do is on the noise scale, let's see. So we can actually brighten a bunch of these things here with the noise that we have. So we can see it is not as dense. Which is pretty cool if you look at it like this. So one thing that we probably should do here is we should probably add a saturate, which is sort of like a better version of clamp here. We don't want to completely bork this. However, let's add in a multiply here four our noise so we can actually make the noise more intense. We should definitely start with at least a one. Let's save this. Now when I slide the noise intensity here, you can see that we actually start breaking this up quite a bit. However, I think we may want to do something larger kind of like this. So now we have created something that looks a lot more natural and has a lot more variation here. So this is actually cool. One thing that you may wonder now is, Okay, cool. I like this. But now I have this big hole here and maybe I want a different. So how can I do that? Like, how can I move this texture? That is very easy. We can just add an ad note here. And another add node here. So these are a vector two values here, right? So what we can do is we just take the vector three right now and we add a component mask here, so there's no weird value hiccups in that sense. We're going to connect this to add. We're going to turn this into a parameter, and we just call it cloud offset. And now the cool thing is that if we move the R and G values, it gets added and it will offset these textures. If I put this over here, you can see that it did I not save this? So here, yeah, there we go. So here we can see now, right? I said this quite a lot. So if I just start sliding this a little bit, we can now orchestrate how we kind of want this to be and we can move these into sort of, like, interesting areas here. So I kind of like having this here where we have this little light pocket. I think this is actually quite neat. So this is a really good way of just figuring out a bunch of really cool cloud things here. And also, one thing that you can do, you can add a power in here. And I'm holding S for the parameter again and then call it Cloud power. And the default for power is one, then it doesn't do anything. But. And values higher than one increase sort of the power contrast. It's a bit different than contrast, and values lower than one will make it brighter. So if I lower this, we can see that the clouds disappear, and if I power this up, we'll get something more like this. And something like this is quite cool because you can see how it creates this, like, nice variety here with these, like, really cool light pockets. And I just want to move the clouds a bit more. So let's see if we kind of like this. I think that could be kind of cool. I want something where definitely I want this to be in the light like the gas station, but I also want to have something where I can really see something nice here. Yeah, maybe this is not too bad. Yeah. So this is the thing, right? It's always the balance of how do you want to do it. Yeah. So let's go with this for now. So we can see that this is actually, like, a really nice way of adding something. So this feels a lot more believable than like you can see Oh, this does not work anymore. Interesting. So this adds a lot more realism to this whole area. And it's a quick way to make things look a lot more natural. And this is also something that, for example, on Star Wars, on Battlefield, we've done it so much. It's just really a very good way of adding believability and realism to your environment. So now I just want to fix this color back here because it starts really to, like, annoy me. And the quickest way to do this is to make this one here brighter. So let's try 4,000. So maybe like this and then pull this a tiny little bit because I don't want to I don't want to have a sandstorm back there, so this is kind of good. Alright. Actually, I'm just missing this because we do have the in scattering here, and I think that this one here is actually also the in scattering. No. Oh, it only works with the texture, I guess. Yeah. They changed a bunch of things here. I remember. Okay. Yeah. So we can still use this if we want to. So like these values when they're black, it is made so that it works with the sky atmosphere. So since we don't have the sky atmosphere, Let's do something like this. That's quite cool. So yeah. And now we can, as always, just, like, add a little camera actor here to do something cool where we can just see a little bit better what we actually have here. So it is still like it is quite foggy. So, of course, we can slide that back down again. More like this, maybe. So now what I'm going to do is so here we can see the aspect ratio, and a lot of, like, film stuff has 2.3, like for, like, cinema, stuff. So, you know, we can get, like, these really nice white angled shots now. Which is pretty cool. And we probably want to go to cinematic. So everything is kind of like there. So, yeah, we can start to get some really nice stuff like this. And this is starting to look quite good here. Okay. One thing that I think is quite important. When we work, I would never recommend to use cinematic because it, it's like it overrides lot settings and stuff like that. I can become quite expensive. But for nice screenshots and these type of things, you want this all to be rendered out properly without any weirdness. So this is definitely a way to do it here. I kind of want to do my thing here, and we can see it on the clouds when I slide this. It just, like, adds this little oomph. I want to, of course, add just a tiny little bit of vineyard here. And then we kind of, like, expose it more like this. To look at the bloom stuff later on in one of the next lessons. Then, of course, where is it? My favorite here. We got to add a bit of grain and we're going to start with a horrible amount of grain, so we can tweak it like this. And then you know me. I'll reduce it a little bit in the mid values. I will reduce it a little bit in the high and then I will scale down the whole thing to something like this. This looks good to me. And we go to our cinematic camera actor, and we actually go like this. Place the shot nicely. And then we make sure that we track or well track that we just focus on our car here like this. Beautiful. And then we're going to render out a high risk screenshot. And we can look at this and say, beautiful. This is a very good step in the right direction for our setup here. So with this one done, thank you so much for watching and see you in the next lesson. 18. Lighting Large Environments Part3 - Exterior: Hello and welcome to the next session with our nice exterior environment. So I was thinking a bit, and before we continue to further dig into all the cool stuff that we can do here, I just wanted to show a few things and explain some of the settings and things we can do inside of Unreal a bit more. So in case that anyone would like to do a certain workflow or so, they can and they understand how these things work. So one really important thing to note is that this scene was not built for UnreelFV. So it was actually built for Unreel four, and UnreelFour had obviously a bunch of features are not there compared to Unreal five. And some features are also rather expensive, like, for example, doing tesselation on the terrain is really expensive and can be quite taxing. It can also introduce visual artifacts when you tesselate the terrain quite a bit up close and then over distance, it sort of like tries to log back into the normal terrain grid structure, so to speak, and it can have little breaks and stuff like that. And one really interesting thing is my buddy Andrew again. He came up with a really cool technique. So there is a feature inside Unreal that is called pixel depth offset. And what he basically did was he used the pixel depth offset together with the height map, and he displaces the pixels based on the height map in screen space, and then he uses the screen contact shadow feature that Unreal has to cast virtual shadows from the geometry. You can see here that the bark has all these small tiny little shadows that make it seem like the object has a lot higher geometry than it actually does. We can see it here, for example, here on the bark. We can see all these things are here, like all the leaves and all that kind of stuff. It casts these shadows, which makes it seem like there's three dimensional geometry when there actually isn't. Here, this is a very beautiful example as well with this little wooden pole. And that is a technique that is not super well known. I think I wouldn't say that he was the first one to do it, but maybe he actually was. So, a lot of people have been studying this content, and they were like, Oh, wow, this is actually really cool and it adds a lot of detail to the surfaces. He was doing this on the terrain as well and with that, he got shadows from all the little details. One of the things that we have is when we don't actually have geometry, things can feel rather flat because they are normal map so they are shaded correctly in terms of just where the light hits and where it doesn't it doesn't mean that the normal map features actually cast shadows onto other areas of the texture, which obviously makes things look flat. So this scene here was built with the same techniques. So almost everything in here uses pixel depth offset and has the height maps hooked up and uses the contact shadows in unreal here to mimic that sort of depth behavior. So why is that important? Well, one of the most important things is that Nant is not supported right now because this is 5.03. This is not like 5.1 or something because that's not out. It's not like a custom built from Github. So, these features, they have been improved, but this is the normal version. So right now there is no support for masked materials. Foliage is a little bit broken. There is no support for pixel depth offset or vertex animation or vertex world position offset in that sense. With nanite. And that means that if I go into the nanite visualization here, you can see that some of the mesh scattering that is here is using nanite. There is a few parts of the cliffs because a lot of the cliffs are actually splines and splines also don't support nanite like spline meshes right now. So you can see here that the exterior, for example, for the diner, also hasn't set nanite to work because there is a part of the mesh that is the glass, which uses a translucent material, so again, not supported. But if we go inside, we can see that nanite is turned on for a bunch of these meshes. However, looking back at the outside here, what this also means is that our geometry here is not as detailed as you would potentially like to have it with the nanite meshes and all that kind of stuff. So to basically still get a lot of detail, this screen space shadowing technique with the height maps was utilized. And right now, I'm using the Virtual shadow map, and I actually found out something really interesting. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch this back to the normal shadow map here. And now, if we just go down here, we can see that all of this looks basically exactly as we expect this to look, right? So there's not really any shadows from anything. Like we do get some nice screen space GI bounces here on this little. So this is like all the mesh scatter, right? All these little stones being scattered around here and some twigs and stuff. And we can see the twig is actually getting a little bit of the shadow map. But then again, the shadow map is using cascaded shadows here. And it's just not enough resolution detail to pick up on the small stuff. And then, again, we also have nothing that really makes the texture itself. So let's go here because here is no mesh scatter, as you can see, there's the mesh scatter. This is just a flat texture, right? And this is kind of interesting that we have a lot of this stuff here under the terrain. Very interesting. Not sure how that happened, but we'll just accept this. So when we look at this here, again, this is very flat. So what was done here was to basically say, like, Okay, we use this pixel depth offset to cast shadows. And again, if you want to understand how this works, because we can't share this content since it was sponsored. But if you want to understand how any of this works, you can get the free rural Australia content and you'll see how the shaders are being set up, how it's all done. It's pretty straightforward, so it's not like Voodoo or anything. So now inside my directional light, I can search for contact or just like this. And we can see here is this thing which says contact shadow length. And so this is not like it doesn't have a flip or anything. So what we need to do is we just need to say how long they're supposed to be, and then they happen. So for one thing, this feature was not necessarily designed for this in particular. But what this was designed for is kind of like, let's have a quick look here. So if I'm going to take a point light here, and I'll make it like a lot brighter. Let's do, I don't know. Something like this, right? So here we can obviously see that we do actually get a lot of shadow casting. But this is also very high as shadow map. But you can see that here, for example, we do get a little issue where the shadow is not really connecting. So if I would go in here and add the contact shadow, it closes the gap. So it's just like it's not a shadow that casts a large amount of shadow, and actually here it's even introducing some artifacting. I would interesting. So now it just got better. So, this just basically closes the gaps, and it's kind of like really neat here, but now we can see that it's actually longer than our actual shadow. So if you just remove this. So it can also cause issues, right? So you don't want to make this so long as that it starts overriding the actual shadow map. So this is a feature that has to be tweaked very, very carefully. You just want a little bit like 0.02 here, for example, and that already helps with the contact information, which is why these are called contact shadows because they're supposed to fill the gap between the filtered shadow because the filtered shadow has a little bit of, like, a bias and stuff like that. So it can sometimes create this effect where it feels that something is not grounded. So if I, for example, take this guy here that is probably not supposed to be in the ground like this, but whatever. So if I'll take this and just move it over here, are we? Holy ****. Where did I move it to? Okay. Actually, we don't even need this guy. I just notice we have our shield here. So sometimes we can get this effect where we can see here clearly that the sign here, it is inside the ground, right? But we can see that there's almost like a gap here in the shadow casting. And that is because these shadows, they have a certain resolution. So sometimes they cannot represent certain small details. And we do have simular issues most likely elsewhere. But for now, let's look at this. So if I'm going to take my directional light and I'm going to start adding these, this will start connecting. So that is what the feature initially was designed for. However, now that we have this technique here, you will see that as soon as I turn on the contact shadows, we'll actually start seeing something here. So I'm just going to do 0.04, and now look what happens. So now we suddenly got shadows here from these little stones, and they will react to the rotation of my light source. Or we got a shadow here. Again, this is not geometry, you can see how the shadow actually starts fading away when I go to the screen edge. If you look here in the right side, bottom of the screen, you can see how the shadow fades in and out because it is screen space. However, it does add a lot of perceptive perceived depth to the material. So again, if we just do this, we can see now it feels almost like this was being tessellated or something, which it is clearly not. And also, if we look over here, we can see that now our shadow actually starts connecting. And one other cool thing is that here we have all this mesh scattering, and this mesh scattering doesn't cast shadows either because of the same reason that we don't get the contact information here. So with these screen space shadows in place, we can see how all this geometry suddenly casts a nice shadow. So obviously, this looks a lot better, and it really helps to sell all these little details. There is a little bit of bugginess sometimes, so you can see here, it's like they're not always perfect, especially in combination with vegetation and overhangs and stuff like that. But for example, when you have some really dense grass using the Caltech shadows on grass, it just makes the grass feel so much more three dimensional because usually your shadow resolution is not good enough for grass from the directional light. And this technique is something that was heavily used in Ghost of Sushima, for example, to get grass shadows. So if you play ghost of Sushima, have a look at it and do this thing where you rotate the camera and then you can see on the screen edge, how the shadows of the grass are disappearing when the grass itself basically starts being out of the screen. So now a really interesting thing that I noticed because now since we have the virtual shadow map, things actually change a bit, and I was really surprised to see that because, again, I did not know. So if I turn off, let's go to a proper spot here where we have so here we can see here we have the texture with the shadows. And here we have the mesh scatter. So we have both, right? So if I turn this back off, again, no shadows at all. So now, look what happens when I turn on the virtual shadow map. So suddenly, with the virtual shadow map, we actually do get the same height map shadows as we got before without, if I do this, without the screen space nature. So this seems like the virtual shadow map, even though you can see that it does a little bit of a wonky thing, like now the shadows are disappearing, now they are appearing. So there is something with the pixel depth offset that does feed into the virtual shadow. Again, I did not know that. So this is actually a cool discovery in that sense, that we still get these sort of things happening here. And I think that this that it changes is probably based on how the pixel depth offset gets computed and some other stuff of how the shadow map traces against this. Like, to be honest, I'm not entirely sure. But again, if I switch this back we can clearly see that we do get a lot more definition from the Virtual shadow map. So now, one thing that you noticed is like, Okay, so cool. We have the Virtual shadow map. Also, the Virtual shadow map has a lot of resolution, which means we do get these really nice, hard contact shadows here that then becomes soft like it happens in reality, like nice soft shadows here. So, however, we don't really get any shadows from these small little like pebbles and all the mesh scatter here, like even looking at the twigs, like, no more twig shadows. So what is going on here? Why did it work when we do said this, right? And the reason for that is the screen space contact shadows. They don't know about content specific settings because they run in screen space. So that means they get actually calculated based on the buffer targets. And the buffer targets is this stuff here. So this is basically like, if you want to understand physical based rendering, I'm not going to go into this. I mean, it's not necessarily purely physically based rendering, per se, but it's just like deferred rendering versus forward rendering. These are the most common technologies, techniques used for rendering. And unreal uses a deferred renderer. And if you really want to understand what is happening here, you would want to read up on how a deferred renderer works, and it works by basically creating these what we call buffer targets, so like base color, specular subsurface, normal, all these types. And the calculations that are done in screen space are done on these buffers and other calculations, too. But anyhow. So one thing to know is that the contact shadows, they work on everything in the image. So if I have an object, so let's say, I don't actually know if this is like, we can just select this. So if I go in here and I turn off cast shadow, we see that we still get this thing here from the screen space shadow. So let's go in here. And so here you can see how we still get the screen space shadow growing in. So the screen space shadows, they ignore the settings of the object itself because they have no information about that object. So what that tells us is that since all these little pebbles don't cast any shadow, they probably have their shadows turned off. So if we don't want to use the screen space contact shadows, but we want to fully rely on the virtual shadow map, and we do want all this stuff to cast shadows, we probably need to fix some settings here. So let's just go over here where we have a lot of this. So now, how is this done? So if I click this, nothing really happens despite that we select the landscape. And this is different from selecting, let's say, this bush here. Because here you can see this is all part of a instance foliage actor. So what is this a part of, you might wonder. And this stuff is distributed using the landscape grass feature. So what we need to do is we actually need to look at the grass types and figure out how they're set up. So for that, you can see it goes away when it says building grass maps, and that is an indicator that all this stuff is scattered using the grass system, which is fine because the grass system is not necessarily only for grass. It is basically just scattering meshes across the terrain. So we need to go to the master, all very clean here. So here we have our grasses. And we can just start with the first one so we can open this and we can see inside of this. So this UI is really annoying, sort of, because there's a lot of stuff here. So what we're going to do is we basically search for shadow whoops. And now we just basically turn them all on here. So you can see these ones are probably bigger meshes. So we're just going to turn them all on and hit save. And then we're going to go into the next one, which is the cacti. We're going to search for shadow. And again, like I have no idea what's all in here, but we're just going to turn all these on. And again, if all this stuff would be like, nanite and whatever, we wouldn't even have to worry about, like, the screen space, shadowing stuff and all that. And most likely we would not even turn some of these things off. We would just, like, roll with sort of the default settings. But I just kind of wanted to explain quickly how this has probably been made and how it's probably working. So I think it's important that everyone also has options, right? So there is no right or wrong here. There's just really preference. But I think that if you work in a way how, for example, the Valley of the ancient was done or stuff like that, you may not, do this, but if you want to work that way, you at least know it's a thing, so you can do it. And again, it is never really about what is right or wrong. It is just about what are the options? What is it that you want to do? What seems the most beneficial to what you're trying to do. And personally, I feel that that is always the way to go then because what is this? Oh, okay. Because, you know, like, no one is judging here. It doesn't really matter at all. So let's just go this way. And we're working so fast that the grass map rebuild doesn't really follow quickly enough, but that's fine. We just set this all and then we let it think for a while and we should be good. And this should be the last one. And now we can see how all that stuff is actually casting proper shadows. So now we basically have the same as with the screen space shadows and also we get the shadow from the height map here. So all in all, this is pretty cool. I mean, there's still stuff where it just seems a bit flat and all that. Like, this would probably be better if it would be a little bit more like, yeah, wobbly in general. But again, nothing much that we can do here. But now everything, all the twigs, all that kind of stuff, this just works well here. So definitely an improvement. Nice. So now that we have looked at this, one thing that I also wanted to do was look at the bloom settings in our post process volume. So I think I've mentioned it a few times already, but personally speaking, I'm a very big fan of like, one of the biggest problems with CG stuff in general, and that is not only, like, games, right? It's that things quite often look a little bit too clean or too pristine. And I don't remember who said it, but I just love the saying. And the saying was basically imperfection is the digital artist's perfection. And I love it because per default, everything that we build is more or less perfect, but that is not how the real world looks, which then makes things look like sterile or fake. So like, our job and not only, like, as three D artists or, like, whatever type of artist you are, our job is to introduce very tiny layers of imperfection into our work, so it actually does feel more believable. And since this is a lighting course, a lot of the things that we can do are obviously related to lighting and to cameras. And we've talked a little bit about it in some of the earlier sessions where I said, like, Hey, let's add some grain. Let's do some very tasteful tweaking of chromatic aberration. And one of the things that is actually one of the most important things I feel like is the bloom because so first of all, quickly, we only have limited ways of simulating stuff here because we have to work a bit with the features that we just get from unreal. And you can do a lot of, like, fake lens effects using particle systems. However, that is not really what's going to happen in this course, because this is almost like a course of its own on how to emulate lense effects using particle systems and all that kind of stuff. It needs some very specific texture creation. It has some quite involved math. But it is absolutely doable to do these kind of things. But what we're going to use is we're going to use the features that we have at hand. And so if we're going to go into the bloom, this is basically what bloom simulates is sort of like what happens inside of a lens when really strong light hits the lens, and then there are interactions that happen between the different lens elements inside of a lens that can cause something to bloom or to leak and it creates certain effects, right? And now what we have here is we just have our standard bloom settings, right? So we have the method, which is set to standard. We have an intensity, we have a threshold. This stuff does not matter until we change this up here. And so the threshold to minus one, as far as I know, means that here, minus one, all pixels affect bloom equally. So it is like, it is basically like, so if we want to limit the bloom to happen in only certain parts of the image, we can exclude it from other parts that are not bright enough in that sense, right? So the first thing that we can do is to just illustrate this here, we can crank this, right? And this is like, this is oblivion here. Elders Gross oblivion, I mean. It's this like maybe some of you remember, like, back in the day when before, because in the early days, there was no bloom. And then, suddenly, like, video games discovered the bloom feature. So every game just had, like, so much bloom and it looked awful. And this is sort of like a bad Taylor novela or something. But so the thing is, you kind of really want bloom when something is hit by, like, a very, very, very strong light. Like, this does not look accurate either. Like back here, so let's reset this. And if I just increase this a bit, you can see how this just starts tiny, little bit like glowing. And also, back in the day when there was no vlometric simulations, people also used bloom to create this more dense atmosphere. But again, it creates this really dreamy look. And one thing that we can do is when we have let's say we want this, right? But like, we want to control this because like, right now, the threshold is set to this, so it's affecting everything equally. So let's first start with a zero. And now we can see that this is basically doing kind of what we want because now what we're getting is where the light hits at grazing angles or really hot, like, look at this. So it is basically still hitting a lot of the stuff, but it's kind of like where the sun hits the most, it really blooms, because without this, it kind of, like, blooms everywhere. And if we set this, we can see, like, Ah, now it blooms here where it's like, hitting really hard, right? So we can see how this is actually changing things up in a cool way up here. So this may look a lot more filmic in that sense because we're having this effect now. And then we can obviously tweak this even further, right? So we can see now we sort of compare this to zero. We've removed a lot of the parts, and then it depends on how strong the sunlight would hit. We would actually still get bloom back in. So here we do get a lot of bloom. You can see that next to the car. So if I would do this, there's even more bloom. So we can sort of say, how strong does something need to be hit by light to bloom. And then when it blooms, we're gonna kick in at, like, super high intensity because before that, we obviously had this. So it kind of, like, looks the same as we would like, increase this value, but this is just really how strong the parts bloom that bloom. And this is kind of like, where do the parts that bloom end up being, okay? So this is really important to tweak this properly, and doing quite high intensity, but at the same time, keeping the threshold in check can actually be really beneficial to create some good looking stuff. So this can be really nice. However, now let's get to the important part. Oh, sorry. Also, one thing before we go to the important part. Down here, you can tweak the bloom as well. And I'm not sure if all this, okay, it seems to work because in OnRalFour some of these were, like, completely broken. So, for example, I'm not sure if this actually does work. Let's see. Uh, that's one. Okay, here we can see now this is purple. So this is fantastic because in Unreal four, this was completely broken, and it was really annoying because, like, using this stuff here, this is, like, so much fun because you can really like, change a lot of the behavior. Actually, I'm wrong. Sorry, I might need to correct myself because I'm not entirely sure if this one was broken in UnreelFour, but what was broken was the lens flares and these ones here. So these ones did not really work in UnreelFour because you can use these to, like, move the elements and all that. So we're going to look at that in a bit. I'm sorry for mixing these up. I think the normal bloom used to work. So no, but what I wanted to talk about is lenses have very specific behavior. And what that means is that, like, for example, the way that they flare, so bloom is not a word that exists necessarily in photography. It's more flaring. That is what it's called. And if we look at some of these elements here. So obviously, we all have the beloved JJ Abrams stuff that everybody loves to hate and all these kind of things. But basically, what usually happens is this, right? So we have a very bright light, and then it scatters throughout the lens, and it usually creates this one is called a star flare or a star burst. And then the lens flare is actually these little elements. And the way that they come into existence is that when you have a lens, so let's say this is the lens, right, beautiful lens here. So inside the lens are obviously, like a tons of lenses and they all have different, like, things, how they're like, built, and they're like, shaped differently and Yara Yara. And here we have the sensor, and the light kind of, like, goes through this and then stuff happens, right? So when you see stuff like this here, like these traditional flares or like this, for example, very beautiful here. This is what I consider to be a beautiful lens flare. If I would make lens flares, I would want to have something like this. These shapes that we see is light refraction going through these different lenses. Then when you move the camera, they also parallax in different ways. This, for example, is something that I consider to be not a very beautiful lens flare. It just depends on also the aperture and stuff like that. But I really like stuff like this. This looks rather fake to me. That's probably made in Photoshop. But there are some really, really beautiful lens flare effects. And you can see this one is probably a mobile phone lens. So these effects with these dots and things, they often happen with mobile phones because their lenses are built in a very, very specific way. And here again, we have a beautiful star burst. So when an image, when something blooms, usually things like this happen with the lens. It's not that it just looks like this here, right? So, if I would go in and let's say 20. So here you can see this is just like an equal effect. So it just basically blurs this and, like, it just glows around, right? And again, this is not necessarily what would happen. What happened is something a lot more like this here. And to simulate this, there is another version of bloom inside of unreal, which is called the convolution bloom. And now we could see that a little bit of something happened to the brightness here. And one thing that is really important to know the convolution bloom is that the convolution bloom per default, it has a bunch of settings down here. So like, not all of the settings work for the convolution, so you can see the intensity, it does. But, for example, the threshold does not. Then we have this thing here, which I actually haven't used Okay, this would be an interesting thing to try. Okay. Yeah, no, let's not do that. So the convolution bloom has the settings down here. So what does the convolution bloom do? The convolution bloom uses a kernel texture and scatters it around the screen, and then it uses these parts where it should bloom, and it modulates them by the texture. And per default, even though this says none, there is actually a texture that is being used, and it's this one here. And if we open this texture, this is what it looks like. We can see this is actually a really nice star burst bloom like effect. The most important thing is this texture is an HDR texture. You can see when I expose it differently, there's so much more information that is visible here. One thing that I really dislike is I really dislike this green and red color. It's quite often these become visible when people use these textures in unreal and you can instantly tell it's the default texture because it has these colors and stuff like that. But there's nothing wrong with this. Like, these textures to make them, it is rather difficult because you need the height dynamic range, right? It needs to be an HDR image that has all this. And so how these are usually created is you take a camera and then you point a flashlight straight at the center of the camera lens in a pitch black room, and then you take pictures with different exposures, and then you merge them into an HDR image. And that is how this is usually created. You can also render this with some stuff, but it is quite nice when you have a good camera and a good lens to shoot this based on your lens. Anyways, now that we have this specified, what we need to do is these settings down here, they are not tweaked for physical values. So we don't necessarily get what we want up here, but you can see that there is something sort of affecting things already. So that was mostly the intensity here. So how do we tweak this? Let's try something nice here. I'm going to see if I can just place a light in here where we have our metals. And now I'm going to just make this, like, way too bright. And now we can see here is the bloom hitting. So here you can see how this is kind of like having the star shaped kind of thing. And if I switch back here, it looks like this. And this is not very photorealistic. However, this is a lot more photorealistic. So this is kind of like a good way to tweak it. It also kind of seems like they have improved the default settings a bit more. So it kind of seems to work with these physical values quite well. Because I remember in On Real four, it did not really work out the same way. So let's see. Yeah, this is just shrinking it. I think I used to tweak this value here. But it actually seems kind of like, Okay, for now, so maybe we don't really need to touch it much. But one thing that I want to try, since I told you that I don't really like these colors a lot, I thought, Hey, is there any way to make this feel better? And what I did was, I kind of did this here. So per default, I actually added in more variation here so you can see that, I just wanted this to be a bit more complex, kind of like this. We may actually tweak this a little bit more. To something like this, I think. So I was just trying to see, Hey, how does this feel if I make it more complex? And then I changed also the colors a little bit. So when I expose it like up here, you can see that it is not as green as before. And I just wanted to try that and see how it feels. So we can just save as here. Let me see where to put this. We need to do safe copy. And I think I should EXR should be fine, I think. All right. Mm hmm. Didn't seem like it has saved it. 1 second. Picts. Okay, now it has done. Okay, cool. So we have this. We're going to open up our content browser. I go into my lighting folder. I'm just going to add my bloom kernel texture. So now I have it here so we can see it. Let's see what happens when we apply this. And this is very interesting. So there could be a bunch of reasons for this. So the first thing is, I'm going to open this one here. And then I open mine. And now what we need to do is we need to make sure that we have the same settings here. So probably go with no mid maps here. Text, la. All good. Uh is there anything else? I think this should actually be it, but let's see. I've never done this before, so, you know, this is actually quite interesting. I'm kind of curious why this is happening. It could potentially be the changes that I did to the color. So I'm just going to turn off the color changes. And save it again. Because it shouldn't really cause any major problems. Yeah, so it probably was the color changes that I did. And the cool thing is like this stuff, it can actually look like pretty pretty cool when you have, for example, a little light bulbs and stuff like that. So I'm just going for my good friend, the Editor sphere. And I'm just going to scale this down Oops. Like Cero 0.0 0.1. So we have this here. Obviously, still a bit too big, but that's fine. And I'm going to do this really, really quick and dirty. I'm just going to take my sky material here and I'm just going to crank the brightness. There we go. So we'll basically turn this into a little glowing ball. And here you can already see how we have these because there's varying brightness, obviously, we have these different kind of glow bursts happening. Let's do 0.05, 0.01, 0.025. Let's do this. All right. So now I'm just going to crank the brightness more and more, and now we can see how we're starting to get this, like a lot more interesting blur shape here. So you can see we're having something like this. And this does look a lot more natural than this, right? So we can use this. We can also just, like, go back to the old kernel, which is like this. So, you know, I was just really playing around with this here, trying to do something and this is definitely what I recommend to be used for the bloom and all these kind of things. So we will get a lot more natural behavior, generally speaking, when we have bright stuff. Which could also, like, become important for this stuff here when we're like, inside, and we'll have, like, a different exposure, which, okay, still not bright enough. But, you know, we'll get there. It'll all come together nicely. But overall, it is just what I feel like should be said in general. So this took quite a bit of time to do all this. But I hope it was interesting and you learned a bunch of cool things to try regarding the bloom texture. So what I did here was I used the channel mixer to change the color, and that was the thing that made it go all bunkers. So now, you know, don't do that. Don't use the channel mixer. I think that hue and saturation is usually fine, but it can introduce some artifacting. So this one here is just a rotated version set to lighten so that is no problem. So basically, this change did not really make any difference. So you know that, too. It's not really a problem. But if you want to do stuff like that, don't use the channel mixer. And so, yeah, we've now looked at all these things. And in the next session, we will continue to go through the elements that are not necessarily the natural lighting. So we're going to just make sure that all these values work here because ultimately, what we're going to do is we work towards a setup where we can do different times of day and different light settings, and all the things they will just work in tandem. So right now we done the exterior setup. We looked at a bunch of other things, but we need to get the local stuff done, like the emissive values, the lighting, all these kinds of things for insights. And then we can do a bunch of variations with different exposures, and we'll always get working lighting that looks cinematic and is just very well, pleasing to look at. So yeah, thanks for watching and see you in the next session. 19. Lighting Large Environments Part1 - Interior: Hello and welcome to the next part. Where are we going to look at some of the more localized settings here to make sure that we have some good values that are properly working for any time of day that we're going to choose for this going forward. So one of the things that I would like to do is, I would like to add some new levels here and we actually do have a bunch of things already in here. So we will reuse some of these. And First of all, what we need to do is we need to move all the stuff that we have right now into the correct layer or level here because I want to turn some of these off. So let's see how we go with this. I will not change the post process volume for now, but what I will do is I will take the fogs here. So let's double click this. So it's highlighted. Now we see it's highlighted. And then we can select these. Actually, we can also rename them. So let's do this atmospheric fog Sonny, exponential fog Sony, we select these, and then we right click and say move selected actors to level. So now they're in here. Then we go with the skylight. We're gonna call this Sonny. It's selected. We're gonna move it here. Is that already in here? Yeah. Okay, cool. So this one is already in here. Perfect. And then we have our directional light, and we can see here that this is in a different level. So we just move it over here. I'm going to save this. I All right. Now the last thing that we need is our edited sphere here. Let's just call it sky dome Sonny. And let's move that one in here too. Not really sure why this is taking so long now. There you go. Okay, perfect. So now, when I click the little eye icon, I'm going to move this off screen, we get this. And it may seem a bit counterintuitive, but this is actually perfect. So because here's the thing, an interior like this, it is not lit to, like, look great when there's a lot of light from the outside coming in. An interior like this, it's usually lit in a way, so it works to look nice and cozy during darker times because that's what we use lights for. Also, there's just way less influence from exterior lighting in many cases, and so this is kind of like done in a way, so it looks nice and cozy and welcoming, right? So what we will do is we will hide all the exterior lighting so we can actually work with the proper influences here. But one thing that we need to sort of do is we need to also figure out what are the type of lights that we actually have in here. And exposure for something like this is usually very different than what we have outside. So this is our outside exposure. I'm just going to set this to five quickly. So now we can see, like, Yep, there's lots of light coming in now from the exterior. But we also just want to see, so what do we have to work with here? So we do have these ceiling lamps here. We do have these lamps here, and these ones are interesting because the ceiling lamps, we will most likely end up using spotlights for these because they just pace in one direction. These ones are a little bit more interesting because they have this glow or sort of like so they will emit light in almost all the directions. So we need to see how we do these. And this is pretty much all the light sources that I can see. What is this? Okay, it's a vent cover. Alright, great. So this is basically all the stuff that we have. And here's one thing that everybody should know about me. I really like to do practical lighting. So that means that I really like to light my scenes based on the actual light sources that are in the scene. So I'm not a big fan of, like, fill lights or fake lights or movie lights, whatever you want to call them. They can be necessary. But what I really like is, for example, when you look at movies that are practically lit, what they do is, like, if they have something that needs to be lit properly, they actually just really put a real light source there, so it works. They don't do, like, a fake light that suggests that something is readable while it's actually not. So usually what I like to do is I like to start by just using all the light sources that are there and utilize them properly. And when I see it doesn't do the job, I think about, well, can I put new light sources somewhere so it makes sense or, like, how would I like to do this, right? So let's start by doing just that. So usually lights that we have inside have certain brightnesses that are common, let's say that. And you can see these when you go to, like, websites of lamp manufacturers. Just looking here. Hold on a second. So for example, let's say you have Phillips light bulbs, right? So you can actually go here and you can see, Okay, I want to choose by cap, I want to choose by shape. What do I want, right? So let's go simple first. Let's say, okay, just looking for a normal bulb here. So now, this is all the stuff that you can just buy at the store, right? And most lambs that we have inside, they're also what we call warm white. So this is a rather bright one here. So let's just go and look at this. Now, this does not really tell us much. So what we need to do is we need to see all the specifications. And here we can see a lot of things that are quite good for us, right? So we can see that the color temperature is 2,700 Kelvin and that the light intensity is 1055 lumens. That is a very standard light bulb. So a lot of the light bulbs are between 800 and let's say 2,400 ish lumens. While, like 2,400 is actually really on the bright side. Like, most light bulbs are around like this or 1,500. And this is what you have in your living room. So a lot of the light bulbs that are used for stuff like this here is a bit more, let's say, moody, like, they're not as bright. Usually, it can be different as well. So this is sort of like the ballpark that we will end up with, right? So the first thing that we can do is we can just start here, and for now, we're going to use spotlights. We're not really use anything else for now. We'll switch this to movable, and then down here in the advanced section, we go down here and we switch this to lumens. And then what we also going to do is we're going to hit this used temperature. And here, I don't remember if I already said it, but I probably did. I would always use temperature when we work with, like, normal light sources. Like, there's other stuff like lights that like, you know, the sodium, yada, yada, light, thingies, and lights that have specific colors and wavelengths. We don't use temperature for those. Like we can for the warm ones, but there's, like, cold ones that almost go towards some greenish stuff. So it is better to just Google and pick the RGB values for those. But for, like, normal light sources, they're pretty much always on the temperature spectrum. So we will keep the color here at white. And instead, we will use the temperature, and I'm just going to set 2,700 Kelvin now. So that's just what we do. And this is going to be this is a rather warm color, right? So now for our intensity, let's just go with the value like this. It is going to put it somewhere close to this thing here. And again, I'm not trying to make this super accurate or beautiful. What we're doing right now is we're actually more interested in value balancing. Okay? So we're going to do this here, and now we can see that we don't really see a lot of this, which is also kind of expected since this is still daytime, and even though we just adjusted our exposure, it's not going to make the light super visible because that's just not how it works. So I'm going to turn this off and I just realized that I put this in the same layer because I had this one turned on. So it placed it automatically in that layer. I'm going to switch here and say move selected actor to level. So now we're good. And now when I turn this off, we have this. All right? And now, what I want to do is I want to go into our exposure, and now we need to make this look proper. And there's a bunch of ways to do so. So for now, I'm going to rename this here and call it post process volume sunny. I will put this back to one. And then I'm going to go down here. And this is all good. Now I'm going to add another post process volume. Right here. And for now, I will just call this post process volume interior. I will make this unbound now, but we will change that later. This is just really like for now. And then I'm going to do priority. I'm just going to do five. It could be one. Doesn't really matter. And now, when I go in here, I should be able to overwrite this, which I am right now. So now comes in, like, a lot of knowledge of stuff that I already have or did in the past. So now we can see now I'm choosing an EV of three. EV of three to five is more what you would have for an interior like this. And now you can see something really interesting happening because, like, first of all, yep, you do see this one here. At the same time, you see a lot from this. And this is purely emissive lighting that happens from the sign here. And this may actually end up causing us some problems because this one here will have an emissive as well. And here's a problem with lumen. You can't really say that emissive does not contribute to the lighting. So as soon as you use emissive surfaces, you'll always end up getting emissive lighting. And then if you want to use and so we call the placed light here, we call these analytical lights, you kind of end up getting twice the lighting to a certain degree. But still you'll get obviously more accurate shadow casting and more accurate specula from using analytical light versus doing emissive. But it is still kind of cool that we have this because if I turn this off, you can see, like, there is some nice indirect shadow casting from this. So this is still pretty cool here. But we can also see it's like way, way, way, way, way too bright. So before we continue with our local light here, we may as well go into our sign here, and I don't know, I'm just doing something like do this like 200. So like I just lowered the intensity 5000-200, something more like this. And we can already see that it is doing a lot better job here. But let's ignore this for now, and let's look at this. So now the question is, Okay, so we have this at 1055 lumen. So do we want this to be the look? Like, do we want this to look this bright or hot? I'm not entirely sure if I want that. So what we can do is we can just raise this a bit more and maybe do this. Because what we need to understand is we will distribute this anyways, so there will be a lot more. But again, it's still kind of hard to tell. So how do we fix this properly? And here's something that I like doing is, first of all, I'd just like to get a rough ballpark, which I did just now. And then we have this BP here, which is actually great because what we can do is we can just go into the blueprint which is over here. And we can take our light here and just copy it into this thing here. And in the viewport, we now have this beauty, which is actually quite interesting that it rotates it this way. So let's just see this should be okay, -90. So we just put this in here, and the one that I have selected here, we delete it. Oh, actually, this is funny. Okay, so the blueprint is actually rotated. So we're going to go with 90 again. This is the right way. So now we have this. And if we go into our lighting only, we can see that we're getting some GI from this. It's not too bad. It's also interesting that this one seems to be a different one. And honestly, I just wonder why. I don't know. So here's a sad thing. In Onwel four, you could right click and then select, and then you could select the same type. This context menu seems to be gone, which is very unfortunate because it's a really cool feature. Let's have a look here quickly if there's actually shortcuts for this. Control shift and that might be the one. And that's a bit unfortunate. Okay, let's try this Control, Shift A. There we go. So this is the other one. And so what we can do is we can take this guy here and browse it. So we have it here. And then we click these ones, do this, and then we should be able to replace selected actors with this one. Boom. Alright. So I recommend this highly to just use blueprint light sources because it just is so much easier to get everything set up in a quick way rather than go in here and spam all the lights manually. Also very important is that all this is, like, slightly off the grid. So, if you would just like to move these along this line, it is not necessarily working right out of the box the way it should. So that is just something to keep in mind. So now we can see a bunch of things here. So first of all, we get some really harsh shadows, and that is because we don't have any source radio set on our light. And we also get this kind of thing here, which is not really what is happening. Like, it's basically like our angle is too narrow. We don't really want that. So we're going to go in here. And first of all, I'm just going to drag this down a little bit more like this. And it's a bit hard to see here. So we're going to increase our angle a bit maybe to something like this. Maybe we pull this one down, so we actually have it here as well. All right. And then what we can do is we can change our source radius here a bit because here's the thing, if we look at this, of course, there's one light bulb in here, but the actual light source is going to be this illuminated piece of glass. This is sort of like what starts distributing the light. So the light is not really being emitted from the center here, but it's emitted from out here, right? So it's a bit more like an area light. And what we can do is we can tweak our source radius. Until we start seeing it is lagging a bit here. I'm not exactly sure why. So now we can see this is our source radius, right? And we don't want our source radius to look like this. We want it to sort of reflect this shape. So let's do maybe 15, 12 and 12 seems kind of like good enough. And now what has happened, you can see here, we're actually getting more soft shadows, and this is because of the virtual shadow map that is doing this. So this looks a bit more realistic, then I'm going to reset it back to zero. Like, this looks bad, right? So 12, definitely not the same fidelity as trace shadows, but still so much better. So now we have this. And when we look here, there's already a lot happening here. And we're also getting this issue, and that is because of the way that our light source is colliding here with the thing. And this is pretty cool here because we're actually having a subsurface material from what I can tell. So it means that when we have a light source behind it, it actually starts making it glow. And here we also get our nice star like shape. So let's have a look on our material. Okay. No, it's not subsurface. So this is basically just a bug from the source radius clipping through the object, as it seems. That is something that can happen. So what we can do is we can just take the light and we can move it out. The thing like this, All right. And then we can obviously go into our emissive material here and we can change this a bit. So this is a bit, sad, so to speak, because here we can't really choose the color temperature the same way. So we don't really know the exact value for our 2,700 Kelvin, although there's online converters. So that's also a thing that you can do. And now we kind of just want to up this, and we can see it starts glowing here, but it doesn't really glow here, and that is because of the value not being HDR enough most likely. So I'm just going to try something intense here and it is not doing it. Beautiful. Oh, it's that one. Great. It was just derived from another instance, from another instance. So this is what happens when you're not focused. So I put this in. And one thing that is also really important to understand is sometimes these like the light source itself can feel incredibly bright, but the actual lighting from it is not. So what I mean by that is if you take a picture with your camera of a light bulb in your living room, and let's say it's a free hanging light bulb, the light bulb will always be super bright on your photo. While the actual environment lighting from the bulb may not be as bright. That is something that is important to understand because, like, these things, they just glow so much. That is something very natural. That they blow out this much while the light itself is not as extreme. So now what I would like to do is I actually feel like this is a bit too much light here. So again, we can say, we stick with this and we're going to use this exposure. We can also say, like we changed the exposure. So to something more like this, and this actually does feel quite good to me. However, what I would also say is probably this would be better, and the light itself is probably 1055 lumen. I think that for a light source like this, especially if they have so many, they would probably go with a lower lumen value. I'm going to try something like 800, 600. It kind of feels like it would be better to have it a bit more moody. And there's a lot of different light bulbs that do a lot less lighting, especially in stuff like this where you kind of want it to be more on the moody side of things. We're getting quite a bunch of interesting issues here. So and looking at this, we should tone down the emissive also a little bit. So probably something like this feels quite good to me. And now looking at this guy here again, we should definitely have a look at these colors and the brightness values. And it's always really good to also look at reference while doing this to kind of, like, choose your battles here with these colors. So we got this I just want to change this here. Make this look really nice, red. So something like this feels kind of good to me. And I think here we were on something like this. Alright, this is not too bad. Now, this one's going to be a bit tricky. So I'm just going to choose a point light here. And we need to see how that's going to mess up because this is always a bit tricky when you do these kind of things to make sure that it kind of, like, works. But now we need to see. I'm going to use the temperature again, 2,700 here. This is kind of okay. Switch this here to Lumens as well. And now we can see that even 400 lumens is quite bright. And here's an interesting thing. So point lights always look brighter than spotlights, even though with the same settings. So that is just something to be aware of. That's a thing. We also want to change this to something like this, and now we're starting to get problems here. So we may be able to fix these problems by making these emissive. Again, so let's see about that. And we want to really do some moody lighting here. I'm just going to see how much we're getting here. I'm not trying to make this super accurate. This is just sort of like exploration here. So this is the first step of starting to do this, just like figuring out a bit of things. And then, of course, we should also add this to the blueprint instead, which will help a lot. So just like pasting this onto the scene root. There we go. And then we move it down. Like, so So now we just need to do the same thing again here, where we select the control shift A, O or not. Let's just select these and replace them with this one. And now that we have this, there's a few things that we can now think about. So first, we can think about how we do the distribution. But there's also more where we can say, like, Okay, do we want these ones to be exactly the same? Do we want to change the colors around a bit? So there's a bunch of, like, really interesting things to figure out now. So let's stop with this here for now, and then we come back in the next session, and we're going to make this look a bit more interesting. We're going to place this out a bit more where it makes sense. And then we're going to just figure out something that is nice and that we really like. So thank you so much for watching and see you in the next session. 20. Lighting Large Environments Part2 - Interior: Hello, and welcome to the next session. And we're going to continue to make sense of this interior here and try to tweak it really well. And one of the things that I need to really stress is that all the stuff that we're doing here, it's really a lot of it is kind of like guesswork to a certain degree because we can never really know the exact values of a lot of things. And it's important to also be really clear on, like, sort of, like, the style that you want to achieve. So when I Googled for American Diner interior, I found a lot of different things, right? So there is, for example, stuff like this, this one is actually an unreal scene, as well. I know this one. So maybe this is not like the most perfect example. However, there is obviously still a bunch. And one thing, they are really flat, usually. So it's not that exciting to look at. They're flat, they're kind of boring to a certain degree. So we need to be really smart about how we want to do it. And just a style that we want to go for. I think that this is kind of boring. And we can really, again, see, like, all these lights are pretty, like, blown out here and it's like, very bright and flat. I don't think that's super much fun. So I think we should either go for something like this, which, again, is also very flat still. Or I would actually really prefer to go for something like this. And this is quite interesting if we look at this because what we can see here at the edge of the image is we do have these little lamps here. We can clearly see that the waitress is getting hit by some warm light. But looking here at the couch, we can also see it is not really super bright. So we can see these values here. We can try to make sense of the balancing that they have. So here we can see these lamps are clearly off. So most of the lighting actually comes from all the neon stuff. So it's really interesting. Here again, we have these little ceiling lamps, and we can see how much light they actually do. We can see how much light comes from this. So what we need to do is we need to sort of figure out a hierarchy of lighting. This one is quite good. Again, here we can see that we have these lights, and they actually they don't really they're not the ones that provide the lighting to the room, but they're the ones that just make it so these people can actually read the menu properly when sitting on a table. But most of the lighting comes from the neon stuff. I do like that look. So for now, let's just say we're going to do something more like this. So this is what I will be balancing most of my stuff against. And if we now I've turned these lights off here, right? So I'm just going to take this. I'm going to edit it, and I'm going to turn on my point light here. And so the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to fix all the placements here because as you can see, they want these lights where there is people. So all this stuff, it kind of does not make any sense. So let's fix it. We're going to move this over here. Are we going to move this over here. And there's another cool thing that this brings with it because now that we're more in a corner, we actually do get more bounds from it because it's closer to any of the walls here. So we can actually use that to our advantage. So let's just continue here. I will delete these And I just have to say it but Oh, my God, I love real time GI. Just looking at this, it's so nice. This is a really, really great thing to have. So we're just gonna continue here. We just make this proper. All right. All right. I think this is a good position, so I'm just going to delete all these ones here. And we're just going to do the same thing. Also, I wanted to quickly mention one thing because you may have noticed I'm using point lights here and I have the shadows turned on. So here's one important thing. First of all, like I told you in the past that you never, ever, ever want to use point lights with shadows. And here's the thing. Traditionally speaking, that is very true. There are, however, exceptions. And there's basically two exceptions for this. Or let's say there's three. So if you have a specific scene, for example, someone's holding a torch and there's not much else going on and you want the torch to cast shadows, you can do that because this is something different than what I'm doing here for now, for example, where there's, like, a lot of point lights with shadows, right? So the torch situation, totally fine. Then the next thing is that unreal has a technology that is called shadow caching. What is shadow caching? The reason why shadows are so expensive to cast is because they will basically be updated every frame. And as you may remember, one point light has six times the cost of a spot like shadow. So it basically also has six times the cost of updating when things move or whatever. And case shadows is a really cool thing because what cast shadows basically does is imagine you cast a shadow, and then you just hit the freeze button, and then the shadow does not update anymore. It just stays the way. So it basically gets computed once, and then it never gets recomputed again. And the only thing that it costs is the memory that it takes to store the shadow map. So basically, let's say, if your shadow map is 512 by 512 pixels, that is, like, I don't know, 1 megabyte of texture memory. So you don't pay for updating the shadows. You only pay for the memory that the shadow costs. And that is pretty cool because as long as no object that is inside the radius of the light source actually moves or updates, nothing's going to happen, nothing's going to cost. And that is really, really cool and very beneficial to do. So with shadow caching, you can afford point light shadows, speaking of traditional shadow maps here, if you don't have the lights updated per frame, and stuff moves because imagine I would now, animate all these tables and benches and they would move around, then I would pay the update cost for all these lights, but right now I don't that is a way where you can still use point light shadows if your stuff doesn't update. The next reason why I can actually afford the point shadows here in a pretty good way is because I'm using the Virtual shadow map. And the Virtual shadow map, honestly, I cannot completely explain to you how exactly it works. There is some articles or documentation for it. You can read into that in case you're curious. There's a bunch of things there, and if I understood correctly, the Virtual shadow map is one big shadow map for the whole screen, basically, and every light just renders into it. And there is never a new shadow map. It's basically an atlas shadow, and all the lights just render into it. So theoretically speaking, it doesn't really matter because it's sort of like tweaked in a way that the texture is updated anyways, and it's a rather large texture. So the amount of lights that render into it, as far as I understood, don't matter as much. I might be wrong about that. I may have misunderstood, but that is what I got from it. So, you know, take that with a grain of salt. Okay. So now we have this and I do quite like it. So how do we continue from here? So first of all, I think, for me, it is often really difficult to judge the brightness of the light sources with, like, the difference between spotlights and point lights having different values and all that kind of stuff. So what I usually do is I work with the point lights because I feel that they're more accurate because with a spotlight, there's a thing where like the intensity of lumen changes based on the surface that is hit by the lumen. So candela is a value that is independent from the angle of distribution, but we don't really get the candela values for the lights. So it is also not always optimal to use candela however, what I'm trying to say here is that if I have the spotlight and let's say it has 2000 lumens, and the angle is really big, it might not look as bright. But if I make the angle smaller, it's going to look way more bright because it's going to focus the energy of the 2000 lumen on a smaller area of, like, surface. So it is a little bit hard to judge the brightness of these with, like, spotlights. So that's why it can make sense to use the point lights instead. With that set, again, I don't think that these lights are as bright as the ones that we have in our living rooms. I think that these are more mood lights. They are a bit more doing jobs like this stuff here. So what I will do now is I will decide purely on my gut feeling that I will do 600 lumen on these, okay? I'm going to do it like this. And here's the thing, right? Like, even me, I have done these things a while, it takes me a while to nail exactly the value relationships that I want to have. So it's not something where I just enter it and then boom, call it done. Everything is great. I'm happy. Let's leave. So that is usually not how it works. It is a little bit of trial and error because it's a lot about the feel that you're trying to get. But then again, it is important to check again with the reference because one thing that we can also see in these examples here is at the neon stuff, it blows out quite a bit. So we can see that it's like white in the core. Like this is so overblown that we can't actually see what the sign is reading because it probably has some more detail on top of here, but it's so bright. And in comparison to the exposure, we can't really see what's on here. And that is normal. So to make this look as cool as we can, we need to also reflect these things because I've seen a lot that people are afraid to lose something, so they would make the sign way too dark. But then it kind of looks wrong. It just doesn't look believable. So let's wait for the saving to be done. All right, there we go. So now we're going to just go back to our exposure here again. And let's see how we can nail this in a proper way. I also want to do another thing quickly, which is rather interesting here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the point light and I copy it and I go out here. And this is actually kind of cool that we get this nice lighting effect here. Okay, it doesn't like doing that. Let's see if I can copy paste it this way. Nope, I can't let's do it quickly here. I put in the point light. Got to switch it to lumen. I'm gonna do 600. Alright. So this is the value that we have here, right? And one important thing to note is that you can see we have this is our light source, and we have a very, very huge radius, but our light actually doesn't travel that far. One important thing to also figure out, and this is again, it's for performance reasons, really important to do that. Per default, all the lights have an attenuation radius of 1,000. So now I just halved it and I didn't really get a perceivable change because it seems like we're still not hitting it. If I would do this, you can see we would actually cut off the radius of the light based on the intensity. So this attenuation radius, this is a value that doesn't exist in reality because in reality, a light travels as far as it can given the amount of energy that it emits. This is purely a thing that is meant for video game optimization. But one of the tips that I would like to give you is you always want to have this radius as small as you can compared to the intensity of your light. So having a 1,000 doesn't change anything. 500. There was a tiny little bit here, 600. So I think 550, this is probably the perfect radius for this light without actually causing any light cutoff, and while still making sure that from a performance point of view, we are in check here. So I'm going to delete this. And this was just for me trying to test because it's a bit hard to see in here when we have all these lights. So I'm going to go to my point light, which is on the other screen here and I'm going to go 550. And so something changed. So let's look at what actually changed here. So this is really interesting because sometimes you may actually have another thing with the radius that is not so cool. So I'm not sure. I'm going to do it again and you see if you recognize what is actually changing. So what has happened here is that our specular highlights kind of got cut off. And this is the second important thing to keep in check when you do your light radius, that is that specular of the light cannot render outside of the radius. So if I do 200, you see how the specular from these lights back there is just completely cut off. Even though the lighting of these lights does not reach until let's say here, if I put in the 1,000 again, you can see that the specular reaches a lot further. So that is actually another thing that you can be mindful of. So we just lost a bit I put it to 800. I'm sorry, it's just so much stuff on the screen, then it's better sometimes to tweak it on this side. I could actually try to do this like this. So You want to always be very considerate of all these things. And we can also see here how the specular cuts off in the front. And obviously, there's some lighting that's going missing. So since this is a portfolio piece and not a game, we're going to leave it at 1,000 because it's going to look better. But if you have ever asked yourself the question on why you know, you look at something on art station. You're like, Oh, boy, this looks so good. Like, Unreal can do this. Why do games not look this good? Stuff like this is exactly why. Because when you make a game, you just can't afford this. You may have to actually do this, and then you lose some light here, you lose a bunch of other things. There's just a lot of it that comes with it. So keep that in mind when you see stuff here, this is also the specula coming from the light sources back here on these metal beams. Again, when I put it on 500, you can see it completely disappears, all the readability disappears. So I'm actually curious what happens if I put 1,500 here versus 1,000. So you can see there's a lot of stuff that happens here, and this is purely specular because this is like all metal stuff. I think at least it should be because if you do this, you can see, now I'm in the base diffuse lighting, you know? So when I do this, 1,000 again, it actually does travel quite a bit. So here we have a point for making the radius even bigger because it is more realistic this way because light would travel that far. Again, this is a portfolio piece, so we can do it. I think that we are still a little bit too bright here. So I will lower all these lights to 400. I will go into this and I will just see how it looks on six, but it's probably too dark. Yeah, well, I actually don't dislike this. Okay, so let's do this. So let's assume that this is our baseline now. And one important thing here, as long as we are not higher than six or seven, we are still in a good range for interior lighting. That is very important. So this is right. We're not dangerously high or something like that. So this is going to work out quite well. And then also when we use spotlights, we need to consider that we need to have a lot higher values than this because of the nature of spotlights working a little bit differently, so to speak. So now we have this. So let's look at our neon stuff here because I think this is going to be interesting. And I actually realized something when I did this stuff here. I didn't really use the stuff that I was putting in here because I was using these ones. These are from, like, a parameter collection. So we can totally see like we have different base color here and the emissive color. So this is actually now kicking in the proper way here. So before that, it was quite off. So what I'm going to do now is, I'm just going to go with something that is a lot more poppy here. So I'm going to really go with some full on blue stuff. Oops, of course, with blue and up with green. So I'm going to go with full on blue. Same goes for this. All right. So now that we got this, one thing, we need to look here again, and then we can see, Okay, so this needs to blow out properly. So we need to get it to look like this, right? And for that to happen, which it is absolutely not, we need to crank our emissive value. So if we look here, let's do like 1,000, not there, 2000, not fully there, but slowly getting there, 5,000. Now we're starting to look a lot more like what we see here because we have the bright core and we have a nice blooming effect on the outside. We could potentially even do a little bit more. So let's just see. Let's do 7,000 et's do this for now. We can always adjust. So this was the blue. Now let's take the red here. Same thing goes for the red. We were using this color, so it got all borked and here we're going to do this. So we take full on red, and we take full on red. And we're going to do this. So now we can see we have something that really starts kicking. And since we have blue and red, we actually start getting this nice purple light here. So looking at these because I started reusing the same material here, I think I want to go back to 5,000. Yes, this is a little bit more pleasing. So we're going to go back to 5,000. All right. And with my red one selected, I'll put it into, I click the browse button, so it's selected. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to change it on all these meshes here, right? So if I go in here, I'll just drop this on. And we can start seeing this becoming pretty, pretty cool here. So let's do the same thing with the others. And I'm just going to browse for the blue one. Now I have the selected and I can apply this. And again, this is the beauty of Lumen because if this would be the old way of doing things, we would have to test bake this all the damn time to figure out if it's actually working, if the values are bright enough. There would be so much trial and error. Now the trial and error is rather quick because we just set a bunch of values, and then we balance them out and we just call it a day that did not like, this is not how it was. Back in the day or let's say when I started. Now we have this and it's starting to look actually quite cool here. So this is pretty neat. Now, what I did was because when I looked at this, I was realizing like, Okay, there is a lot of these neon lights and things like that. So again, here is what I said when we started this. Sometimes you need to make a decision to change the content because you need more light. So here you can see that I actually have the same elements that I put here. Am I actually Oh, yeah, these are flipped. I need to flip them. So, I just copy and pasted this here quickly. But we'll fix that in a second. I will apply all the colors first before I Before I fix the rotation of the object. So Okay, now, it should be this one. Oh, sorry. This one is actually correct. It is this one that needs flipping. Now, which one was it? This one is the wrong one. Yes. Okay. Uh this one. So we have this. Now, one really important thing is that you can see here how some of the lighting is kind of like screen space only. And that is that, like, small emissive stuff and so on, it can be rather tricky with lumen. So okay. Yep, that's going to be a bit annoying, but we're just going to select all of these. And there is something that I'll show you now that helps with the stability of smaller emissive light sources. By stability, I mean, it doesn't do wonky stuff when things get out of the view or something like that, right? I'm just going to select all these carefully here. All right. So if we search for emissive here, we can see emissive light source. And when we turn this on, it'll help Lumen to sort of understand better what this is. And we can still see that we have issues with the reflections, but the lighting itself, you can see it stays really stable. I'm honestly not sure why we're having that much of a problem with the reflections. But there's a thing like lumen is still very, very new. There's a lot of stuff that is not yet, let's say, fully figured out with lumen. So you know, I don't I don't know necessarily what's going on here. I will see if I can actually fit this in here. Well, kind of, it's not perfect, but it is okay. Good enough. Do this. Yo. Yeah. That is sort of good enough for me for now. I'm gonna bring this over here. And I just saw something funny while I was colliding the roof there for a second. Seems like there already was something like this up here, which is a bit hilarious. But it is what it is. Alright. Cool. So we have this Now, one thing that would probably make sense as well is to have even more of this stuff over here. I would assume just by looking at some of the reference, right? So it would probably make sense to kind of, like, have stuff like this here as well. Also for consistency reasons. I'm not trying to win a beauty prize with this here. I'm just more or less trying to Oh. Oh, no. This is unfortunate. So we have a little off rotation here. Let's see if we can get this fixed a little bit manually here. Probably like this or something. Let's see what happens when I do this. And again, I'm not trying to win a beauty prize here or trying to compete with my fellow environment artists. I'm just really trying to make this a bit more consistent here, which we can see I already kind of work this a little bit. So I think it would make sense to, you know, adjust these a little bit very slowly. But, you know, this is like, this is the imperfection I was talking about. No, just kidding. But it's alright. It is right. We'll live Oops. Slowed down a bit. All right. So I think this does look pretty cool, actually. So I'm just gonna do this nice round here. And then we should all feel really happy with what we have. Let's see. All right. This seems pretty well alive now. And again, I'm just repeating myself, but this is the stuff where when things don't look right, add more lighting like I'm doing here, like, make it work properly. So it's all consist. I'm going to add a copy here as well. But, yeah, this is just I'm going to actually take one of these for the other side here. But this is just one of these things where if you want to get consistency for your environment and stuff like that, these are the things that you kind of have to do. So it just works properly. And also, when you do stuff like this, like, otherwise, I would need to, like, go in here and add, like, weird kind of, like, fake lights or stuff like that, which again, I'm not a big fan of. I don't really like doing it. I don't think it looks good, either. So doing something like this is definitely the preferred workflow here. So we are slowly getting here. Actually, let's close this gap back here as well, at least from a logical point of view here. Let's just do like this. So it's going to be fine. All right. So one thing that I feel like we're losing these meshes here over distance. And I am, honestly, I think it might be because they're nanite actually. So let's have a look here quickly and see if they are nanite. Yes, they are. So here's the thing. Nant does automatic culling and all that kind of stuff, right? So this stuff that you see back there, it's actually Nanite trying to maintain the small stuff. So what I can do here is I can just select all these and let's see if that works. I hope it does. Otherwise, I've been saying weird stuff. But let's disable Nanite. And it didn't actually help. No, because I know it has helped in the past with small triangles to stay visible. Hmm. Yeah, well, tough luck, I guess. Again, it's still, like, it's just very thin geometry. It might be the screen percentage as well. If you said this 2100, boom. Yeah, there we go. So it actually was caused by the screen percentage. So the screen percentage, not sure if you know, but it basically calculates things at a lower resolution and then scales it up. It can help to make stuff run better in the editor. But then again, when you have these very thin thingies and you have not such a great resolution, this is what happens. So now looking at this and then looking at this, we can already see that we are getting fairly close with a lot of the things that we're doing here. So that's actually really cool. And I think it's nice to see this also for yourself when you work on content, and you do have a proper reference like this that you're working from. Like, it's so nice to actually see it and see how it comes together, how the colors start happening and all that kind of stuff. So that is really beautiful, and it's a lot of fun, too. So of the big joys of not only being a lighting artist, being an artist in general, is just when you see these things coming into fruition and the values matching up and all that kind of stuff. We can really see how the light colors here match really well. Also like our warm light and all that kind of stuff. It makes sense, so it feels good. And one thing that does not feel good, and this is the last thing that we're going to do in this session, one thing that completely does not feel good, and it will actually get worse, I assume if we add the lights back here. So let's do that quickly. I'll just, like, take this guy, and we're going to copy it over. And we're going to rotate it by 180. So let's put this here. Okay. Looks good. Enough. I'm just gonna move this in here. Again, no one cares about the perfect environment art right now here. And honestly, I just need to say this quickly because this is so much fun. But, I have been dreaming for this. Like when I started doing these things, like, none of the technology was this far. So like I have been dreaming of sitting on my computer, copy pasting emissive light shapes and getting the lighting from them to actually do something. Like, this has this is just like, to me, it's just like, Wow. Like this is amazing. Absolutely love it. So again, there's this weird thing when we look here where we can, like, why is there so much light here, right? Like, where is the proper shadow from these things? And why is it so bright inside here? And one of the things that we can do is we can go into lumen scene and oh. Oh. We just suddenly see that the whole thing is not really there. So what is happening here, right? And let's try to find out what is happening here. Which one are we going to? Let's start with this one here. So if I open it, what is the culprit here? And I start with this one first, usually, and it's this one. So we can see distance field resolution scale was set to zero, and as we've learned in the render scene for portfolio purposes with the floor, this is how we can actually disable an object to be seen by Lumens lighting calculations or distance field lighting in general. So now that I did this and said, apply, this is what we're getting. So I assume we should do the same thing with the rest here too. I'm going to do this quickly off screen here. Apply. And are they all separate? Let's see. All right, that did a little bit here. Well, let's look what we have over here. So that looks good. And now we do have a lot more occlusion here. So we still get this, and it kind of makes sense to a certain degree because, like, the light going like this, so it's still going to hit it. But, for example, I think I'm not super happy with this guy here. So what I'm going to do is, I'm just going to bump the resolution to two. And we're starting to get somewhere. I go to bump it to three. All right. I like this a lot more. So what's with this table here? I'm going to bump this one to three as well. And this is also just a good thing to do in general is when you have all these objects, just like, do a little bit of a sanity check on the resolutions to make sure that they're properly reflected in the lumen calculations. Now we got this good stuff here. We could potentially increase design as well just to make sure that it has better data to work with. So I'm just going to do three as well here in resolution. Is more accurate, good stuff. And then we can also see that there's a lot of the small stuff here that is not really represented like this stuff here. And there can be a lot of reasons for that. It could be that it's the size of the object. So if you look here, it is not visible anywhere. It's not visible in the Lumen scene, the reflection view, the surface cache. It is just not there. And again, this might be due to some of the settings that we actually have in here. So if I go into Lumen Overview, can see that we can increase the detail for the lumen sine and now the small stuff started appearing, you can see how it really just starts having more of the objects reflected properly, and we can also increase the final gather, which in theory should make it less flickering, but you never know. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Also, one thing is now my performance is actually quite a bit worse because also of me switching the screen percentage. For now, I'm going to do this and overall, like, we'll see how we go with this. So now we do have stuff here that looks a lot better than it did before, and we're getting somewhere really nice with this interior. So let's call it done for now. Let's make one last thing. So we have something nice to look at before we call it off because it's just always so much fun. I mean, we can already imagine how we could do some cool stuff if this was glowing nicer. Let's go somewhere where there's actually something on the table. Um, So, you know, nothing too fancy, but, like, you'll see, we can do some pretty pretty cool stuff already here. So, again, I think we did quite well with this so far. So thanks everyone for watching and see you in the next session. 21. Lighting Large Environments Part3 - Interior: Hello and welcome to the next session. Let's continue setting up our stuff here so we have the interior pretty much Well, let's say as perfect as we can go for now. One thing that I want to do here is I want to fix this guy. I think I will get rid of all the lights in here. At least I will just turn them off for now. O And then I will have a look at this material here because you can see that we actually do have some emissives here. Let's just assume this is most likely to brighten us. So let's just see what we get when we start cranking this up, and this is perfect. This is what we want. And again, this jukebox is probably glowing a lot more. So we kind of need to see here how much we want to push it. I kind of think this is probably good enough. I don't want it to be too bright, too blown out. And one of the beautiful things here again is that we go to lighting only. We do actually get some light from this. Now, we may want more. We're not yet entirely sure here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to select this. I'm going to search for emissive. I'll make this an emissive light source and just make sure. So it's, like, as stable as possible. Now what I will be doing is I will turn some of these lights back on here because I kind of want to know what is actually happening. What are they doing? Because, the one in here might actually be needed in a good way. So I think the ones that we will not turn on are the ones on the outside here because this is something that we're going to get from this. So let's have this back on. And I definitely don't like the shadow casting in here. I will Oops. Yeah, that's because of the screen resolution of my left screen here, but I will increase the radius a bit, so now we can see it's at least getting softer here. What does this look like? I think that's gonna be right. So judging by all these values here, et's just see. Honestly, with this exposure, like, probably something like this makes a lot more sense. Let's reduce it a little bit. I think this is sort of like a bit more in the ballpark. Going to reduce it slightly because this is. And then I'm going to take this rectangular light here. And this one is just like a nice little floor highlight like this. And this needs a little bit like time to get used to to work like this with these values blowing out this much and stuff. It's something that feels at first, a little bit counterintuitive, but you can see how it really starts tying all the things together. So it is something that makes it feel too much out of place. But again, it can totally also be tweaked based on taste. So I just think like this, it's kind of like a little bit lacking. But we can for now keep it like this. Will be interesting though to just quickly check. If we can find some cool references for this. Just to get an idea of how bright are they usually and how does it feel? Because here you can see this is what it looks like during day. So there we get the colors. So during night, we can not during night, but during artificial lighting, we can see that, okay, this is not very bright here. So it is actually not that blown out based on what I can see here. So let's be mindful about that. Cool. So we have this now. Then I just really feel like here should be more something like this. I just think it just looks better. Again, this is just purely based on my feel. I do think that here we have obviously the bar lights. So I think that I'm going to just move this over a bit. So there's gonna be like a sort of a door light here. I'm just going to clean these up a little bit here. I think that is a good position. So what I kind of want to try is if it's possible for me to remove one here and then just space them out a bit better. Maybe like this. So now the cool thing is we also hit her better now. So this is kind of, like, helping us as well. However, here I am a bit conflicted because if I look at the reference, there's a lot of, like, more specialit lights here in the sort of like the counter area. And I'm just thinking if there's anything that we could sort of do with this Yeah, and we do not really have any other measures. So what I would like to try is something different. Let's take this guy here. Let's duplicate it and just call it small. Now, let's have a look at this thing here. The first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to hit Browse, and then I'm going to replace this with the small version, which doesn't really do anything, but it's fine. So I'm going to do is I'm going to delete these here. All right. And in case anyone is wondering, with all the noise and all that kind of stuff. So I have to say that there are a lot of these type of issues with Lumen, where, if I go in here, you can see, like I have the quality pretty high. I'm not using the rate tracing again because it just, like, really killed my performance in the scene, which is not using Nanite that much. So I have the quality quite high here. I do have the quality quite high here. This is just like this is what it is. Like, there might be a bunch of console commands and, like, stuff like that. But it's just it makes it a lot more expensive as well. So this is what we have to deal with right now. And some of the solutions here would just basically be like change the roughness values of the material to be less noisy. So you can see that it's better here in the ceiling and there might just be a tiny little difference in the roughness. So I actually know, to be honest, but could be this one. So if we look here at the roughness multiplier, I have no idea which way it goes. Okay, so 1.5. Two. So, now it's like it's definitely a lot cleaner, but it also looks like significantly different. Well, of course, So this is just a trade off here. And again, this can be done based on taste. So let's look at this light here. One thing that I want to do is, I want to scale this down. Maybe 20.25. So this could be cool. Okay. Then let's go in here and try to be slow because now that we get so close, this all changes here. So here we get our spotlight. And so there's one reason also why I moved the spotlight down because first of all, you can see how the polls are only one sided. So if I move the light behind this, it will not really create shadow casting issues because the light will basically just shine through it. So why did I move it? The reason for that is over here, we can see that there's a bit of volumetric cone and the volumetric cone, if I move the light here, it's going to look really awkward because what's basically going to happen is if I just take a snip here or not 1 second. So if I take a snip here, right? So if the light is here, then the angle of the light will kind of be like this, and this is what the volumetrics will look like. And it's kind of weird because the light is actually here. So if I move the light up here, then the angle will hit more like this, and that way, the volumetrics are connecting to the actual emissive shape. So that is one of the reasons why I moved it a little bit behind. And now we obviously have scaled this, so we need to change this a bit here. L's just wait for the autosave. Oki doke. So let's take this and make it so we see it here. I'm going to move this. And you'll see that now the cone for the volumetric is connecting differently. For this now, it's actually quite fine to just leave it like this. However, what's not fine is our source radius is way too big. Wrong thing. So let's scale this down, put it more in line with what we have here. Now we have this thing here. What I want to do is I want to have a lot more of these. I also feel like, let's try and make this not as warm. What I'm going to do is I'm actually going to go with maybe 4,500. And now you can see it is actually not cool. It is still in the warm range for the color, but it feels totally like it's a lot cooler because it's the contrast to all the other colors. So now let's kind of move this here, and then I'm going to turn on the snapping, and I have no idea what's going to happen. So let's just try. Hey, and this is actually beautiful. So let's do this. Oops. Let's just give some light to this stuff here. I think this is kind of like enough. I can see we're getting some really nice bloom here from this. I'm going to select all these. Well, not this. And what I'm going to do is I'm just gonna copy them once more. And let's see what happens if we copy them one more time. And this is actually not super bad. So one cool thing that we can do now. So let's leave this for now. We can always delete this, and we will also tweak the settings here. But one thing that we can do is, I have a sequence here, which is this one. So I'm just going to open this, and this will make the characters snap into position here. And now we've actually lost quite a bit of that lighting, and it does look really awkward. So what I will do is I will take this. And I will probably just, like, move her slightly. So Just, let's see here. And then we'll just move this guy away. So this will just help us a lot here, because, again, when we have stuff like this, we just need to make sure that we put the characters properly into the scene. So now our performance has started tanking as well. And that is because all these lights, they do a lot of stuff here. So the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to try and limit this a bit here. So let's go here and do like 200. And it hasn't really changed so much down here, but we're basically just really limiting now the radius of these. So you can see that this way, like, not much is happening here, which is kind of like what we want. But what we'll do is we're going to start expanding this into something that I will call the sweet spot here. Which is probably going to be around here. And we are too low here. Let's see. Okay, so definitely want to hit these. So but now what I'm actually thinking is, I think I want to delete this row just to save some performance as well. And this is looking weird. So we will move these a bit. And this is also like a thing, right, where it's always a little bit like something you have to figure out how you want to do it properly. So we could actually, let's do something way different. Let's do one of the most done things in the game industry. Well, copy this. Why do we not see the light here? Because usually you see the light and you can just turn it off here. This is interesting. Anyways, I'm just going to create another duplicate. I'm lazy, so I just create a duplicate so I can have the sizes and all that in place like of and I will replace this one with the ceiling light off. Then I open the ceiling light off, and I will turn this one off. So now what I'm doing is I'm basically just having a basically a mesh version here that doesn't actually have the light. Oops. And it also doesn't have the volumetric, of course. However, we do get quite some good density here. So I would argue that there's not necessarily a real problem here. So if you look at it like this, it doesn't really feel like something's missing at all. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to select my mesh here. I'm going to browse for the emissive. I'm duplicating it here. Just call it like swap lamp. Oh. All right. And I'm going to make this more like this. So this is probably more like the 4,500 Kelvin that we had. Let's apply this here. So now you can see that we also just have something that looks a bit like different in the way it glows. Let's save all this. H All right. So boosted this a little bit. And I'm actually thinking about also making the spotlight a little bit brighter. So I increased it 400-800. Because the reason why I'm doing this is that you can see how these lights here, they're adding soft ambience. But also here, this is kind of like this is the counter, right? So here you want that it stands out. It's like she can be seen as someone who's there for you. So these areas are usually a lot more well lit and a lot more neutral. And also, a really important thing is they're making the food here, right? So there's a lot that has to happen here where you kind of want to see what you're doing. So that is usually how this works. I will reduce the volumetrics a little bit on this one here. You can see I cranked it a lot. And the reason for that is because I wanted to have overall, I didn't want to alter the vlometric fog globally as to have this really, really smoky or thick in here. I just wanted to touch this more on how I want this to feel like base. So this is a good way of doing it, as is just, like, altering the volumetric scattering in here. So you don't have to basically make this super foggy because you can see, like, here, I'm running the default extinction. So if I would put this to like ten, like, Yeah, cool. We get all this, right? But it's kind of like not really what we want. It kind of looks like cheap as well. So this is one of the things that I feel like is really important, generally speaking, is when you do your things, like be subtle about the stuff that you use, don't do, like, too much. This is like something that I see so many times, and it's sort of like a classic beginner mistake is that stuff is done too much and not when it actually really hits with, like, the proper feel. So I just opened this one here as well, the hanging one, and I'm going to adjust the volumetric scattering a little bit here as well to just give it a bit more. So let's see. So we can see it just adds a little bit in here. It's not like super in your face. So I really kind of start liking this et's see how does our dude look over here? So he looks well lit and he blends in. So one thing that is a little bit off here for me, and that is just, like, the reflection fidelity with Lumen is not always the best, especially when it comes to mirror like reflections. And you can see he does have a little bit of a thing in his eye, but we can also see, like, it is not as cinematic as it could be even though I mean, this looks good. Like, this does not look wrong or misplaced or anything. But if we would want this to be just a tiny little bit more cinematic, we would actually need to fake light it. There is no way around it. This would be perfectly fine for gameplay. For gameplay, this dude looks good. But for a cinematic, you would definitely like do more, right? And that could be like whatever light source you want to have here. So it could just be like something where you go in, I need to get rid of this. So now you can see how he already has the better highlights on his eyes, and of course, this looks like really bad. So that's not what you're going to do. So what we're going to do is we to create a sort of, like, more soft version of this, right, where we're trying to figure out how to properly light the man in a way that does not look too offensive. And then, of course, we have the thing where, like, this looks already so much better, and we have some more specular interaction here. Probably need to move this a bit. Then one of the most crucial things is we need to match the color, too, because otherwise it's going to just look so fake. So I think we were 2,700. So now, we have this, of course, it's doing quite something, but it also doesn't really feel out of place, right? It just doesn't feel too bad. And this way, our character, she gets, like a lot more interaction here that kind of works. So if I were to, I don't know, just take this thing and go in here, sorry. This, of course. Just like trying to frame the man. H. So this could actually work. Again, we don't have anything from the outside right now, so that's totally lacking. But also one important thing here, a lot of these character shots are often done with completely different lenses. So probably more like something like this. And you can see how that actually kind of works pretty well, especially with, like, a nice dove like this. So we could, like, you know, could be arguing here with someone. And this does look really nice, right? We could also now go into our rectangular light. And now that we're off the thing, we could also be more creative potentially with our aerial light here, right? So we could do something more like this or we could actually change the color here. So this is totally something now. The skin is a little bit more natural. And this is what they do in movies, right? They do light shots like this. And if you would go out of the camera, you would see this, and you would see that it does not really match the scene anymore, but this is just what they do for movies, right? So there's absolutely nothing wrong with doing something like this, and you can see that, of course, we are getting something rather nice, like nice soft shadows, like everything just looks kind of good here. So I'd say that this is a great shot, to be honest. And because it is, we will just keep it. All right. So let's just take the light here and turn it off. So one thing that we need to do as well, so we have these values all done here, right? So now what we need to do is we need to also look at our exteriors here because we can see that, yeah, this is not really flying yet. I'm curious. Are these the same? They kind of seem like it. So I'm just going to this is probably just gonna be red. So we're just going to do that. Just go to go red one and zero and zero. And based on the other one, we had 5,000 emissive. And here we are definitely having some issues with the downscaling. But this is good. And while we're at it, we actually going to go and do the same thing to our beautiful gas station. So you may ask now why does this kick in quite a bit more than this? And that is because the bright colors, they do sort of, like, hit more. Like when a color is more saturated, like red and blue and stuff, it actually becomes like perceptively darker or not only perceptively, but it just like it sort of has a darkening effect. So we probably don't need to have the same exact intensities as the other one. So let's do sorry, I'm just doing this off screen right now, but I'm just setting like 4,000 here, and Let's see how much we want. I think 3,000 is probably nice whoops. And then we do it for the other one, which is the flickering version. So save this. So we got this. Then we also have this beautiful neon sign here. Which also we need to see that is the green one. Okay. So let's see how much we do here. 4,000 on that one. 4,000 on that one. That actually does look pretty good. And we can again see the beauty of lumen here. So this is completely just the lumen emissive lighting, hitting it off. We're getting some pretty good indirect shadows here. This is just insane. I wish we would have had stuff like this back in the day. Then let's look at this guy here. So why is the ceiling light off? Is there one that is on? Let's have a look here. So there is an on material, but they're all not using this. Let's do this quickly. Let's go into the light here. And then I have the on material, which is also too dark, but that's fine. So let's open this one. Let's give this some power here. Which is actually quite insane because you can see how this is already kind of doing some stuff here. So I don't want this to be warm at all. I want this to be on the cool side of things. Sort of like this. And then what we will do is we will go into the blueprint here again. And we're going to add a rect light. There we go. And I'm going to This is interesting. Is unitless. This is because I just saw this value of 5,000. I was like, that is very uncommon. So you can see here that apparently, when I add it via the blueprint, and I didn't know that, but I just noticed you need to switch it because it spawns as a unitless light. So I'm going to make this rather bright for now. And then I think this is the right rotation here. So now what I kind of want is I want this to resemble this shape, right? So I'm going to move this down here so I see something. And then we're going to go and move this down like this. And then we make it long. Ah. Sorry, the cat was clawing into my leg here for a second for some reason. So let's do this. I'm just gonna put it like this. So now what we got to do is we got to also, like, reflect that with our light color to a certain degree here. Hello. Yeah, sometimes it's just thinking about something, and I have these, like, little hiccups slash AGS here, but I think it should be should be fine in a second. Or not. Alright, here, back after the crash, I just had to, like, fix this again, and I am making these lights here really, really bright because if we assume that this would be night and we would expose this properly, this is kind of like what we would get. So if you look at, like, because the gas station lights, they are actually really bright because obviously the gas station needs to have proper lighting during the night so people see what they're doing. So if we look at this here, we can see depending on the exposure, we get a lot of bloom from these lights here. Stuff like this is so cool. I really like this. But you can see that there is a lot of course, there are small gas stations like this too. Again, here you see it also depending on the camera exposure, you see how the light source is super bright, but then the actual lighting is not always super bright. But you see that to make these things look really good, they need to be really blown out. So that's kind of what we have here, but I think we can make the rectangular lights a bit less intense because we do have the problem here again. So this is like a thing that is a little bit unfortunate since we do have lighting coming from the emissive as well, we basically get double the lighting to a certain degree. So if I would let's say I turn the emissive off, it does remove quite a bit. So it is a bit unfortunate. Sometimes we don't see it that much now, but it is a bit unfortunate. So I will do let's see. So this is all emissive lighting, right? So we just want to compliment this a bit. So now I'm running 2,500 lumen. But since these are rectangular lights, this is actually a lot brighter than 2,500 lumen. And we can't really do much against this because it's just the way that lumens are calculated with the rectangular lights. So there's sadly not so much that we can do here. Uh, this looks like the deculcator is broken. But yeah, not our concern right now. So this is kind of like what we have here. This is, like, pretty cool, our diner. And obviously, what I also kind of want to do is I want to add some volumetric scattering here. But maybe not this much. Maybe this much. So the thing is, none of this right now really matters much because this is not really the scenario that we're having. So we're going to fix that. But first, sorry. First, we're going to just quickly add lights to this thing. Um, so I just want to make sure that I have everything safe. I think it did crash before because I had many, many of these windows open here. And every window here is sort of like a view port. It eats up rendering resources. So make sure that you always clean up the windows. A dog streaming dog pool size. I'm just going to set this here. All right. And now I'm just going to quickly add it on the here. Add a spotlight. Oops. Get down here compile this. And let's set this to lumen. Let's set this to something warm again. Maybe let's do 3,500. Let's see how we like that. And in our intensity, I'm just going to set it to this for now. There we go. And we need a bit more spread here. I'm going to move this over so I can see better. I think this is kind of right. And then there's this other lamp here, which is probably this one. Let's just add this here. I'm just going to again, move this well, wrong axis. This is where we got to go. So for now, we'll have this. And I do think I'm going to make it a little bit less intense. Were like this. So let's save all this. And then we're going to end this session with this one. And we're going to look at how we're going to utilize this setup with all the other stuff that we've done. So thank you so much for watching and see you in the next session. I 22. Lighting Large Environments - Polish: Hello, and welcome to the next session here. So now that we've done the lighting for this and for the diner, I just realized that I forgot this beautiful phone booth here. So how about we going to quickly do the phone booth as well, so we're actually really ready to get it going with the cool stuff. So I have no idea what any of these lights do here. So I would assume that looking at this, that this is a fill light and there is some fake light shaft thing here as well. I'm just going to delete this. So this is a fill light. I would assume this one is a fill for this one, and then we actually have the proper light which has an IES profile. So we haven't looked at these yet. But maybe we will with this. I don't know yet. Let's see. So what we're going to do is we're going to start by taking this one, turning it off, taking this one, turning it off. And then we're going to take this one and this one is actually the first one that will do anything with it. So we're going to look at our phone booth here. I will turn this off so we can actually see something proper here. So now that I have this, I do think this should be rather cold lighting here. So let's have a look. Let's set this to Lumen. And let's do, like, 800. Why is it not affecting this thing? Because I can see it doing something here. Okay, so here you can see that the light is actually exposed and it is overwritten the intensity. So I just set it back here. So now we can see that we're actually getting this thing. So let's see how much up we can push this. And this is not really in the center. So, let's make it so. Let's go with 1,000 and let's see what we get from the attenuation radius. Here you see switching it 500-600 didn't really do anything, so we'll just keep it at this. I do feel like I want to change the angle a bit though here so you can see it starts hitting more up here because this is the thing that is done with the fill light, usually. So when I when I select this, and I turn it on. Like, you can see how it just, like, starts filling in here. I don't really like that stuff too much. Like, this one seems to be specifically used here for, like, a beauty shot or something. But to be honest, I do think this looks a lot better when we just keep it like this. Selecting the spot like here, we do have quite a bit of source radius. So let's try something because it gets rather blurry with the virtual shadow map here. Let's try and see what happens when we turn on the contact shadows additionally. It does introduce a little bit of artifacting, but it also. Let's not use them. I think it looks cleaner this way. This is fairly decent. I don't really think that we need all these other lights here. I think this is pretty much fine the way it is. What I do want though is I do want more scattering. Honestly, I think this is cool. But again, we will see maybe we'll change it down the line. I don't know yet. It's a bit strong, but again, I do like it, but it is always the same, a lot of these things come down to taste. So do how you please just because I do this doesn't mean that this is the way. Let's go with 3,000 here. 2000 And it's kind of funny because this is rather warm. I will change this and make it cold like this. So now they match. And I do like these looks. All right. So now let's not forget to save this and close these windows here on the side. So now we have this set, right? And again, this is not really how our scene is going to look like. So what we're going to do is we're going to bring back the sunny lighting, and obviously, like, this is going to happen. So one thing that we need to be aware of is that in our post process volume, we do have two volumes here. So we have the outdoor one and the indoor one. Sadly, it seems like they don't usually they showed you here that the value was overwritten. So, when I open this, you can see here the values are overwritten. It used to be in a way where it really, like, showed you because, like, now when it's closed, I don't know which values have I touched, right? So, obviously, the one solution is to go back here. So now you can see how all these kind of tied together, and you can see, like, with an exterior exposure, this thing would not glow as much. This is sort of like expected. And again, this is also a little bit dark. So like, we would maybe stop this up a bit and do it more like this, right? And then this feels really good because this is how it would look like. This is how these would look like. So if we have the exposure kind of like this, all these things, they kind of feel correct the way they are. The same goes with this one. Same goes with the diner stuff here now, so we can see like, yeah, this is definitely glowing, but it is also not too much because this is sort of the exposure that we would use. And then we now have a lighting that is actually mixed between all of these that we kind of have here. So now we would start raising our interior exposure and then suddenly, like, all these things, they start meshing together a lot better here. And in a way that all kind of makes sense now. So this one also, if you remember the shots before with, like, the daylight stuff, how it was like glowing. So there's all these things now making a lot more sense here because we have this proper setup for all these things. And that is the reason why I wanted to do this because now they all going to, like, basically play and tandem. But I also see that we would potentially want more on some of these lights here. So looking at this guy, So this emissive is actually not super bright here. It's on 200 right now. It should probably be more like this. And on the small ones, And we would also probably raise this, even more here to probably something like this. And now this really works. Now we have this exterior being blown out exactly the way it kind of should be. We get these really nice and strong reflections on all the materials that kind of do exactly what they're supposed to do. And this is how we get this to work really well. So now one really big problem is that obviously we do have these two volumes, right? So what we can do is we can basically just return with this one, we can turn this guy on, which right now is locked to six here, which is too bright. But then again, this is also not nighttime anymore, so we do have a lot of, like, outside stuff going on, and eight is actually a really common interior exposure EV eight for, like, architectural photography and stuff like that. So this is really, really good value. So what should we do now? So what we can do is we could potentially just go out here, make this not unbound, but instead, we'll just like shape it up properly, and we can again go into the settings here, and we can use the previewing brush poles. And this way, we'll have a little bit of a better understanding here. And we would probably need to do the same thing here, like for the little entrance area, of course. Oops. So this is sort of like one thing that we can do to get this to work. And there's one big downside with this approach, and that is that you may have seen it actually quite a bit in games, is when you get to the edges and stuff like that, then things start happening, right? So maybe some the colors changes because there's a different color grading or something like that. This is a very, very common thing that happens when you have these volume based techniques that it's just like, by design, a bit tricky to get them to, like, really accurately work. So now if I do this really slow moving thing here, we can see how this starts happening, right? So here's the transition. So first of all, we can make this like this. And one thing that I don't really know, at least I have never really seen it. But I don't know if there's a way to say the time because I think it's a spatial effect. It's not a time based effect, the blend. So basically, like the position of where you are in the blend radius matters. So now, so now it's basically staying, right, and blending the values. So there is no real influence here where you can sort of, like, alter this effect in terms of, like, having it more time based or something. So now we basically have this, right? So we have our little more interactive way of doing this. And one thing that we can also do, of course, is if we say, like, this is, like, quite a lot of bloom, we can just go in here and we can say, like, you know what? Like, I want, like, this much bloom for my scenario here. I want to alter the bloom as well. And now when we just, like, go through here, And here's the thing, right? This is the problem with the blend radius that I was saying. So this is definitely an issue, and the only thing that we can do to fix this is to basically scale down the volume here. And then if you would walk here with your character, it would do a little bit, but now it's kind of like doing it. Okay? So that is one way of doing it. Another way is to use the auto exposure that we have. And this one is kind of like the most interesting way of doing it. So if I take this volume here and I say, let's get rid of this. So I'm not going to enable this guy. So let's say I have the exterior volume here, right? So now what I can do is obviously here, I have it basically locked to 14. And the thing is, I locked it to 14 because I do like that look. And here's something very important to understand about the auto exposure. The auto exposure takes the average scene luminosity and it tries to move it towards something that creates an average value that is medium gray. And medium gray is sort of like it's a value that is often used also, like in cameras and stuff like that, but it's not necessarily maybe the most good looking value. So what happens if I do this? And let's say, I'm gonna put this to eight, so we can potentially go to eight, right, if we go inside. So you can see how it is already brightening the image. So by basically doing this, I gained more range when I'm in, like, darker areas. So you can see that if I go in here now, it is constantly adjusting this, which we can see based on all this happening, right? So, but this is also like a lot here. Like, do we want that? I don't think we want that. But it will help us if we go over here. So now, it will start brightening all this to a pleasing value. And if I would go lower than eight, it would probably even make it brighter. Let's see. Yeah. I'm already locking it here at eight, which is, you can see it would like to go even brighter than this. One thing that we can really do here is we can use a feature called the exposure compensation curve. One important thing that I just quickly want to mention because you remember how we set up our lighting with the ratio of the sun being four stops brighter than the shadows. Overall speaking, this does look quite good. Sometimes you just don't really want that. So for example, don't want that this blows out this much. Even though this is realistic, so you can absolutely go in here after you have made a setup like this, and you see we're on 100,000 locks. So you can totally go down and say, like, Well, maybe not 50, sorry. But maybe go with 50,000 locks. And it will decrease the dynamic range for sure, and it will be less harsh in some instances, right? So I just wanted to say, if you want to do that, you can. All right, so let's start here with a little exposure lesson. If we go to visualize and we turn on the HDR I adaption. So there's a lot of information that we can take from this. Let's select our post process volume here. Which is our outside one. All right. So if we go to exposure here, we can see, and I've added this little curve here, which doesn't do anything right now. So we can see that our exposure is eight to 13. And this is this green field here. This goes 13-8. Sadly, I don't really know if there's a way to get more numbers here, basically every stop or something, it is a little bit, let's say it can be a little bit opaque in that sense. Now, the important thing here to understand how this works is, again, this is the overall range that we have specified here, but it does not mean that there is not different ranges in the image to see that we have this number, just trying to here dark background. So to see that we have the average scene EV 100 is at 13.6, and that is the blue line. You can clearly see that we limit it to 13 maximum, but it actually wants to go up to 13.6 because that is what it says, this is the luminance of the scene and it wants to adjust towards it. The thing is, it may not always be the most visually pleasing thing to go to the recommended exposure level here because we're all artists, so we want to have control over it. And there's, for example, a lot of, like, movies and other media where they underexpose the image to have it really dark and it looks quite cool and a little bit, like mysterious. For example, the Batman movie is a very dark movie. Where there's a lot of underexposed shots. Also, the solo movie is a movie that uses a lot of shots that are underexposed, and they do that because it's a stylistic choice. So if I would uncheck this here, you can see how the white needle moves towards the blue. So the white needle is the actual scene exposure that we have because now you can see here our range is eight to 20. Same again here, if I just turn this off, it defaults to 20. So we're limiting where the white needle can go, and the white needle always tries to follow the blue needle. I measures the average scene exposure, and then the white needle will go towards the blue needle. So if I go in here, you'll see that the blue one goes down and the white one follows until the white one overlaps with the blue one. You can see it reads 10.33 it should actually go down a bit, but, like, that's fine. And here, average seen EV, we see 10.3. So again, the white needle always follows the blue one. So if I want this to not be at EV ten, but I want it to be like a bit higher so it's not as bright. What I can do is I can use the exposure compensation and compensate this, let's say, for one stop, and now you can see how it actually gets brighter. Sorry, I did it the wrong way around, but for the sake of element here, this one, basically, the higher this value, the lower the actual exposure will be. They're inverted in that sense. Now you can see if I put this to zero, it is 10.3. If I put this to one, it will go to 9.3, and it splits the white one and the purple one and the purple one will basically move towards the average, and the actual scene exposure will be moved away by this amount. If I put in a minus one, it will move the opposite way. So the purple one will go to here and the offset will go towards one stop over here. And that is how you control the compensation. So and you can see here that it also goes out of the specified range. So if my max is 13 and I want this to be 14, I can do one stop and I'll get 14. But as soon as I put 14 in here, you can see that it actually allows to move even further than the 14. So if I look into here, you can see it actually allows it to move even beyond the scene average here, so it just doesn't move there. But that's fine. So this is kind of like how you can work with this compensation value. And now we have this asset here, which is the exposure compensation curve. So that is not a specific asset type. I just made one here, and you do that by right clicking and then Miscellaneous, and then curve. And then you just use a float curve. That's the only thing that we need. Okay? And then we get something like this. And the way this works is that you can see here we have zero, zero. So from left to right, it uses the average scene EV, and from top to bottom, it basically animates the slider. So to illustrate that, let's say we stay inside this 13, eight to 13 range, okay? So let's look at something where we say, Let's do look like this. So now you can see here that we have an average scene EV of 10.1, and we are also perfectly here on this 10.1 almost like 10.08. Our exposure is that as well. So if I just go in here and I add a point, let's say I go 10.1. Now it has moved over here and there it is. All right. And now, what I want is that I don't want to be at ten. I think I want to be at 12. So what I need to do is I need to go to minus two. The second value will be minus two. And then we need to turn this one on, and now you'll see it's going to offset it to minus two when we have an average scene EV of 10.2. One problem now is that if I zoom out here, you can see that the line is now constant, which means that we're basically always at minus two. So no matter where we go, you can see that these two always move the same way. And that is, like, totally not what we want. So what we need to do is we need to add a few points and then start actually making a curve. So what we want is that when we are at 13, we want to keep it at 13. So I'm going to add another point. You can, right click at Key, or you can just use Middle Mouse button here. So I'm going to set this to 13 because at EV 13, I want zero compensation. So now you can already see that we're back to the default look of what we had before. This is how it always has been looking. And then if we go to this value of CN EV, we actually get this minus two here. So let's see, because we will balance these out. I can see how they move apart from one another, and it actually does get like exposed so that we are actually, so the white one is where we actually are. We are actually at 12, and that is exactly what we want. And that is exactly the same as if I would turn this off, lock this to 13, and then here to one, and you can see now we move down 13-12. And this is the look that I kind of wanted. I wanted this to be a little bit brighter, but I didn't want it to be like this because then it will go down to ten. Again, it is a little bit hard to understand in the beginning, boom. So now we end up exactly one stop below it. We could also say we want a little bit less. So what we can do is we can just select this and say, instead of two, I want -1.5, and then we'll end up a little bit brighter even. So we'll end up at 11.7 something here. This might actually be a nice sweet spot of not too bright and not too dark. And then, again, we go out here, we stay with zero compensation at our 13. So now let's continue here and see. Okay, so what happens when we go in here? And you can already see it's starting to move them away from each other because we are on 10.7 average here. And now you can see that it wants to go way down. We are on 7.35 here. And the maximum that it allows us at 7.53 is still -1.5 because that is what we set across everything that is below this average of ten. So now we know we want more here, we add another point and then we go like, let's do just seven. And then we want a lot more compensation here than just this. So let's do maybe -2.5. Look, sorry. That was not what I wanted. I actually wanted to make it brighter. So let's add zero because now it means that we will basically go back to the eight that we chose. So if we put this to zero, we'll allow it to not be offset at all, and then this is the lowest that we can go the eight here. So if we want this to be more, there is plenty of things that we can do, right? We can either lower this value or we can allow it to move it even further, like so, and then it will offset it and be a lot brighter because we gave it more room. And here, we have to just make a decision of so what is it that we actually like? And I think that this is not too bad. So now we have our compensation levels set. And the thing is, we might actually want something even more different, but we don't really so we have something here, right? This is our corner value. And we would need to go down to, like, what is it here, L four. But we're actually completely off here, so we can't really, go there, and it's like below our range as well. So if the average CN EV is at four, let's just add this if it ever reaches four, maybe let's do one, two, something like this. So you can see if it really gets that dark, it will still work. And here we are perfect. So now this is like dark again. But if we actually end up doing this, we could really get to these even brighter values. Now it really lifts it further. And this is how you stabilize these things. And how to make it work across this really, really, really big dynamic range. Then one thing that you can do if you want, you can keep it like this, or you can also do the interpolations here where you do something like this, then you just try to set them nicely. So it kind fades in a better way. So they're not as rigid the transitions themselves. So now we have something really nice and stable, and it always does exactly what we wanted to do. We go in here, we adapt. And again, this is just the speed here. Like, you can make it adapt quicker, you can make it slower. It's really up to you. And then we look out here, we can see it instantly does what it's supposed to do. We go back in here, we'll reach a nice value. And this is the key to tweaking auto exposure in a way that it is actually useful because a lot of people, they like, saying they're scared of auto exposure is wrong, but a lot of people say, like, Yeah, this sucks. This is not a cool feature. Like, turn it off. Don't use it. Do, like, one, one, or you know, 13, 13, like, whatever is what you need. But a lot of people say, like, don't really use auto exposure because it's going to make your stuff look weird. That is because a lot of people are just not really aware of how you control it correctly. And this curf acid is the best thing to happen in unreal when it comes to exposure because it just gives you exact amounts of control over how these things are supposed to look at given levels. So that is just really, really nice. And I love it. I think it's such a great feature to have. So this is how we do it. And again, everything else here just looks great. And we go in this just works so well. And of course, if you add your own cameras and stuff, you can always do, like, a custom shot. So that is all up to you. But this is something that you would set up for gameplay, right? So that you actually have a proper working auto exposure. And so, yeah, this is it. This how you do it. I hope everyone enjoyed this and finds this a useful feature. So thank you so much for watching and see you in the next episode. 23. Lighting Large Environments - Evening Time: Hello and welcome to the next session. So now that we've established a bunch of these things and looked at the exposure, made sure that all this stuff works well. Our curves are set up in a good way. Let's look at how easy it is to generate also just different lighting scenarios from all this. The first thing that I want to do here is I just want to do a little bit of cleanup because what is really valuable to do is to have a base post process volume where you just have your master settings and then like tie these to the actual light settings. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to just duplicate this. Take the first one and I'm going to call it PPV whoops, PPV base, and this is going to be my base post process volume. Here are the settings, for example, like bloom and this kind of stuff. I will turn off all these features here because they are specific, so to speak. Usually I have this stuff on here so we can just see if we want more. We have all this stuff. We have this stuff here. We also have the lumen settings, film grain. This is all good stuff. Now we're going to take this one here. What we want to do here is we basically want to turn off all these. And here we really have time of day or setting specific things in here. For example, the exposure settings. I'm going to turn of the vignette because all I'm doing is I'm just making sure that everything is normal, good stuff here. I'm going to turn of this as well because we have it already. I'm pretty sure I did not touch any of these, so that's also good. I will make sure that all these are reset as well. Gonna set this here. Call this PPV. Sonny. And then with this one selected, I'll just move the PPB sunny onto here. So now when I hide this stuff, we can see that we always have our base PPV here with all the settings that are giving us, like, the look that we want. And additionally, we just turn on the setting specific settings over here. So that's pretty good. So now, here's the thing. Like, this level came with a bunch of settings already. And what I want to do is I want to reuse some of that data. So, I'm going to use, for example, the same sky here. But we're going to completely get rid of all the stuff that's there and we're going to do our own. So you'll see again how simple it actually is once we have all these things in place to set up something really cool. So let's turn this off. And now we obviously see that everything that we did not do here is going away one thing that I just realized turn this back on, we do have our fox stuff here. And let's just make sure we are clean. Yeah, this one is probably from the other one. Yeah. So we don't really need this one because we use this one. That's the one that I set. Yep. So we just take this. We move it to this layer here. And it's always good to clean up a bit. We've also touched this one a bit. It actually already is here. Cool. Yeah, we'll just do this because we might want to change these settings for something else. All right, so I'm going to close this. I'm going to turn this one on. Now what we need to do is we need to just go through here and just get rid of all this stuff. We don't want any of this. So we want to get rid of this one, two, because we're going to do, again, our own. Why do I have two measures like this? I don't need this. Gonna remove the skylight here as well, just to do my own thing. And we have a directional light gonna just kill all of these. So nothing here anymore. Good stuff. Now it gets fun. So here we just have our sunset sky texture and the sky dome is pretty much set up the way we've had it before as well. So there's not really much stuff that is of significance or any different than what we did before. One of the things that we just need to figure out when we do that is how do we want our sky to be rotated and all these kind of things. So we can just do that. I think, this one works like this. Maybe we want to do it like this. We actually have it like this here, and I want to just move this a little bit here. It's actually rather small sky. Because we can really see the parallax from moving this, which is not something that usually should happen because you have your sky so big. Yeah, that's interesting. Let's try and scale that up. Didn't change to look much, but now when I do this, it is like, because otherwise we get a lot of parallax that we don't really want from our sky like this. And now let's see. No, I kind of like want this to be like the sunny pocket here. I think that's pretty cool. So now the first thing, while we have our lighting sunset layer selected here, we're going to save this. Make sure this is Uh huh. Okay. So we save this, and then we're going to add our and skylight in here. I was about to say, please don't crash. We switch this to movable. We have all these settings. That's right. I'm going to just add more resolution to this. It should have captured this by now, but we'll just get to all these things. Now the next thing that we're going to do is we're going to add our post process volume. I'm going to turn off the draw brush pulleys for now and I will get rid of the HDR visualization here. So what we want to do now is we want to go down here and say, infinite extent, and we want priority five because we want to add our modified settings to the base. And the most important thing that we're going to do here again is our exposure. So if we remember from how we did things before, there's a multitude of ways that we can start this. So one thing that we can do is we can potentially just measure this considering how it should be done for, like, a sunset sky. And I need to go to my Wikipedia for this. So if we look at this here again, typical photographic scene at sunrise or sunset is 25 candela/square meter. So I would say, let's go just a little bit brighter. And get a feel from there. So again, we just go in here, visualize HDR thing. I'm going to open this material here, and I obviously have my brightness slider to the right. I'm just going to look at this here, and we can see this is really, really, really dark. This is like minus EV, right. So what we want is definitely a lot more here. So I keep on sliding. I keep on sliding. You can see how the exposure is trying to catch up down here. So now we are on one knit, and our goal is to be more like 2025. I'm going to just do something now. I'm just going to go with 50, 49 50. All right. And we can see that our average exposure is at 7.6. So now what we need to do is we need to get our skylight. And we need to recapture the scene. I want to turn this off. And this is rather interesting now. Because it doesn't seem to be catching our sky dome here. And this is stuff that can happen when you when you use, content that you have not built yourself. This can always happen. And this, for example, is actually quite bad here. You would never want to have shadows on this stuff on. So let's have a look at this. Here is the material instance. We have the sky master material, which is by no means anything special here. It's just a few more controls here, but that's nothing of significance. And here we have this mesh being used. So let's try something quickly. I'm going to delete this. And this is usually when stuff doesn't really work, that's always kind of the way to go is to try and delete it and re add it. So there is a sky sphere here anyways. Okay. So beautiful. So let's see this and then there we go. So I have no idea why it didn't work in the beginning, but now we have this. And what we can do now is we cannot rotate this. And that is something with the UV math here. So let's see if we can fix this quickly. That is I have no idea if this is gonna work because I haven't actually done this in, like, years, so I'm very, very sorry. It might actually be the rotate about Axis thing. Yeah, it seems to have screwed it completely. This is good stuff. When you try to do these things, and in the end, you have no idea why stuff is or isn't working. And again, I don't usually work with skies like this. I usually work with, like, very different skis. Let's try the Yeah. I don't really remember how to do this, to be honest. So what I'm going to do is, I'm just going to use a different texture because that is usually how I do it. So let's see what we have here. So I'll be using a very different sky HTR. You guys probably know it already from from of the other sessions that we did. So I will just take my editor sphere here. There we go. And because here's the thing. Again, I used to do a lot of shader stuff, but when you don't do it all the time, you kind of forget how some things work. And what I don't like is when you can only rotate the texture via math. So I like to have control over it by using the sphere itself. And that is sadly something that does not fully work with this approach. So I'm going to duplicate this and call it sky sunset. Then we're going to use this one for now. Oh, it's the texture cube. Let's see here. Because some of these I imported as cube maps for the other tutorial sessions and some I exported like this. Let's see what do we have here? Hey, this might not be super bad. We don't have as much epic clouds or something, but we could look at it and see what we like. I'm going to browse this and I'm going to put it onto my sphere. I will make this 15,000 and then we obviously need to crank it. And this is pretty much the rotation that I wanted anyways. I wanted it to be over there, sort of. So basically that if we move this over here, I wanted this to be the down point here. Like this. Now we have to again go in here to visualize HDR and then we just go up and we are quite low. Let's pump this to 50. Turn of this guy, take our skylight, recapture and now we can already see that it has quite a bit of a different flavor here. One thing that we want to do as well as we really would love to get some proper exposure going here and also get maybe a little bit of sunlighting even though it may not really have a sun here. So we're going to do is we're going to go to this one. And now we're going to set something that we actually like here. So you may have remembered when it was showing us the stuff, it was being around seven. So now that I lock this in, there's not much difference. And I think we should actually go down a bit. I would love to go down a bit. I'm going to change this again. And this is just something that you have to iron out a little bit, so I'm going to go down here. So I will actually go to 25. And there's a reason why these values are measured and why they work. So now we have this locked here. Let's go to maybe eight, something like this. And we can see how this is already working quite well with all the values that we've chosen in here. And this one is obviously a bit too dark. But again, this is a sunset. This is a lot like night. So this is more expected to look like this. And then we can bring in our econal light here. And the first thing going to make this movable, and then I need to just crank this so we see something. And it's switch the orientation here. And I kind of want it to come from here. Then I'll do this. And we really want to have something very long here. And looking at these colors, we do need a very, very different color here. So we really need something more like this. And now you guys can already see how this is starting to blend in a lot better. Okay. I'm not entirely sure right now regarding the intensity, because the light is really, really, really low intensity when we have these things, especially when it's so far back there. But I think we can do a bit more than 50. Let's do like maybe 80 or like 100. And this way, we still do get nice highlights and we get these very, very long shadows here. And one thing when we have very long shadows is we also get very soft shadows. So looking at this here, we can see that our shadows are not super soft, so we can actually crank the source angle here to create some very, very soft shadows. And now this works a lot better already. And as you can see, it was really rather simple to do this. Like it was super quick despite our little odysse with the sky, but that is not something that is super important. So we can just, like, do our things and see how much we kind of, like, want this. So now that we have this in place, we can do a bunch of cool things here. So the first thing that we're going to do is we going to add our Uh, where's our fog thing? Well, let's start with the exponential height fog. Just throw that guy in here. Where's the old one? Oh, that is really interesting. So it only allows me to place a sky atmosphere now and not the actual atmospheric fog component. Now I'm kind of curious because I didn't really look at it before. But if I save this, and I'll hide this, and I'll bring back this guy, So here we have actually the atmospheric fog. This is interesting because it doesn't allow us to place the old fog here anymore. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate this. Because there's a bunch of things where they want to change certain things. I have not used the sky atmosphere if I'm not using the sky system, which is why this year uses the atmospheric fog. It's the predecessor of the atmospheric sky, and I think we just reused the one that was there. Sometimes you can't really play some of the old actors anymore, but they are still really good. There's probably somewhere where you can find it still, and I have it here because it's obviously legacy content right now. We just duplicate this. We go to select this guy. And then we're just going to move this over and then we're going to hide this one again. In theory, the sky atmosphere should be doing pretty much the same thing as the atmospheric fog. So that is something to remember. If I do this, we can see that there are some things happening with the Is this with the height fog. Let's try to make this really clean and make some sense of this. First of all, we're going to hide the exponential height fog, and then we do a moss. Now we have these two, turn this off. Now if I turn on the atmospheric fog or let's say if I turn it off. This is the look that I'm getting. That's very similar but also a little bit different. Now, I want to test something here together with you so we can all understand some of these things better. First of all, we need to make our directional light atmosphere sunlight. Okay. That's great. So if you just revert all these things. So this is rather interesting because this is supposed to be blue. It might be due to no, we hit we hit the sky. Dome. So this is really interesting. So it's clearly rendering the atmosphere, which is why we have the light here. But at the same time, it is also not really rendering anything here. Okay. I might actually be that we're having this problem just because of our sun brightness, because if we have a sun that is so low, it may not actually scatter enough, and then we just have this really, really, really dark behavior here. So in theory, if I go in here and crank my sun a lot, we are actually starting to get something a lot more here. Like this. So again, this is just like when you have this is because it's so physically based. When you have these low values, it kind of, like, starts losing a bunch of things, which is nothing really that concerns us because we have this thing. I was just at first, a bit confused, but the thing is, we don't have all the values in place in a way that is tweaked for the sky atmosphere. So all we want from this is sort of like the distance rendering stuff here. So we just get a bit. Let's do this. And one funny thing that we can try is, you guys have seen that there was sort of like a sun disk, and the thing is the sky atmosphere renders at a very, very big distance. So the sky dome right now is actually occluding the sun disk from the atmosphere. So we can try is, we can try scaling this up 100,000. And at some point, we will reach a size that is so big that the sun disk will start popping in. But I don't remember actually which size it was. And also, I have not done this with the sky atmosphere, so maybe that actually does not work. It used to work with the atmospheric fog. Oh, wow. Now we're getting to some really extreme values here. I'm just going to continue right now just to try and see if it actually works, but it seems like it's not working anymore, no matter how much we actually put here. Let's do this. So this is interesting. It doesn't really seem to work anymore, which is a bit sad. And I'm also still curious how we could get the old actor back Yeah, well, it doesn't really seem to be here in this way anymore, which is a bit unfortunate, but it's also not really anything to get stressed over. So we're just going to use the exponential height fog then here. Now we have the simular problem as we used to have that even though our exposure is way lower, we still have that issue with the brightness and the in scattering colors. What we want to do is we just want to crank this right now to something like this and when I hit Enter here. And now we just want to go in here and start sliding these values around a bit, so we'll actually get something like this. And now, of course, what we need to do is we need to dial this back down because we don't need this much, maybe 80 that feels quite good to me. Yeah, this looks nice. So what we can do here then is we can go into the directional in scattering as well and start lifting that up. So we get kind of like this effect here. And what we can do is we can really put an emphasis on the warmth coming from the sun here. So if we just look at this, we replace it from the sun's direction with something that is really nice and warm. Also, one thing quickly, if we have the edit sphere here selected, and we want to really place our sun properly, if you turn this off, you can see the sun is over here, right? So we can just go in here and just really put this down here, maybe hide it slightly kind like this. And we can go back to our diosphere. So one thing that happens when you have the atmospheric setup is that when you lower the angle of the sun, it actually does adjust the intensity slightly. So you may want to bring it back a bit because it messes with the values because it's trying to physically emulate this a bit. So getting somewhere where this looks actually quite nice here. Whoops. And of course, you can do crazy stuff like this, which was totally not intended by me. I was just hitting this way too strong. But, like, you can see how you can create something a lot more striking in case you want to. Personally, I'm just, like, more a fan of, like, this more laid back look like this. So this is something that I actually quite like. And since we have our fog here, Why do we have the second one again? Oh, I think that was the one that I potentially placed before that. So we can turn on the volumetrics again here. It will change a little bit, as you can see, because what it's doing is it's basically replacing the fake fog over here with some actual in scattering from the sun. So one thing that is definitely worth trying here is going back to the directional light. Then what we can do is we can go into our volumetric scattering intensity and we can try to crank this a bit. I will blend in a bit more with this and we make sure that we see something here. And let's just try some stuff here, there we go. You can see this is obviously way too extreme. But now you can see how the sun is really hitting into this. So where we are in the sun, we get a lot of this scattering going and out here, not so much. But this is obviously way too much, so we have to tweak this tastefully. Maybe something like this is not so bad. If you want this pronounced effect of the sun hitting through here, there's one thing that you can do, and it's basically down here on the I'll start this up on the directional light, we have this really cool thing called light shafts and light shafts are faking this volumetric scattering effect to a certain degree. As you can see here where basically the volumetrics are being hit by the sun here. So behind inside the shadow so to speak, they're occluded. There's this feature called light shafts occlusion. Light shaft occlusion, as you can see, it's basically doing this. It's an occlusion effect that we're getting here. So this is one thing, and then there's also the light shaft bloom, which is this thing here, which is something that people know as this screen space like bloom effect here. It is quite cool, especially when you combine all these things together, you can get some really cool looking stuff. Again, here, this is really just about tweaking it tastefully and not going completely ham and we can obviously change the color of the bloom, make this really nice and orange. If we go away with this and then 0.1, and then we bring in this guy and we do like 0.25, 0.01. So we can see that there's a lot of bloom happening here and then we have this occlusion, which really just occludes all this stuff. And we want to make sure Okay, so it works actually this way around. We don't have it too strong. So we want a little bit, but we don't want it too strong. And this one here is quite intense as well, so we go with 0.05. And now we have a nice combination, and that will also sort of like trying to get slower here. This will also work here quite well. As you can see, we get these cool effects on the trees. And again, all of this is meant to be, like, tasteful and not like, too insane. So we have a nice combination of all these things. Yeah, this is actually pretty good looking here. We have some really, really nice contrast here. I would say, let's do as we always do, grab ourselves a nice camera that is supposed to be somewhere here. So I think there is some overrides here in the exposure. Lens exposure, boom. I mean, we can create some pretty, pretty cool shots with this. So I kind of want to kind of want to do this. I do like this. So for here, what I'm going to do is going to go to the scalability settings. I just put this to cinematic, so we have, like, the most detail ever. So let's do one like this. And let's jump out of this guy here. Performance is a bit tanky, but again, this is to be expected when we do the cinematic scalability option. Let's see how we want to push this. That's always a bit, like, a tricky to find, like, a nice spot here. And let's try something for this one. Just go in here. And, uh have it pop a little bit more. All right. I'm going to do one for this as well, but before I do that, I will just go into all level sequence. I'm going to open this. So the lady back in the bar is actually doing something proper here. Yeah, let's do this. So yeah, now we do have some cool little shots here. And overall, it took us about 40 minutes to get here, and then we had a bunch of sky struggles and so on, which is not a biggie. This can be done really, really quickly, and we're going to do more of these with the next session just to show you how much variety you can bring to all these things with a few simple steps. And we will also look at how we can make the exposure work well because right now, if we go in here, we may want to have this a bit brighter than what we have right now. So obviously, we can set up another exposure curve for this as well and then just have this look like, really, really nice. So thank you so much for watching and see you on the next lesson. 24. Lighting Large Environments - Night Time: Hello, and welcome to the next session. One thing that I would like to do now is just reiterate a little bit of how easy it is to create different scenarios and variations once we have the settings in place. Before we do that, though, I would really like to add a light source here. For the diner to make sure that we actually have some more brightness here. And also, one really important thing is that now we would kind of need to again add an exposure curve in here because it is definitely not bright enough. So I would say, let's do the curve first and also name this so we could have that here. Then in our folder, we just go miscellaneous, curve, float, select, and then do this. And of course, we need to turn it on here. And we're going to start outside because this one we like so let's turn this on. And right now we are locked at eight. And we do have 6.4 here. So let's Okay, let's do this. And then we actually need to go to 7.5 here. No looks the same. Okay, so 6.4. There you go, 6.4. Okay. And we want it to be 7.5. So that's 1.1. And now, this has obviously changed a bit, which is fine because we need to add the final exposure here, so to speak. So what do we want to be the min value here? Okay. I think something like this is kind of fine. So now this is kind of locked here. So, 4.8. Why is this 4.6? A zero. So let's see how this works. If we go out now. We are Oh, no, sorry, yeah, I mixed that up. That wasn't in fact, like six point let's say 6.5. Obviously, not on this one. On this one. So now we are going down to this. I'm adding a bit more minus now, minus two. And then -1.1. -0.8. So now we are under 7.5 when we're out here, which is what we wanted, looking good. And then when we go in here, we are going down To. This. So this is better. Yo, works well. Now we can turn the HDR off again. No. Perfect. And I would kind of like to have something over here because it's a little bit doesn't make much sense for the entrance to be this dark. And these ones are kind of not bright enough. So I'm going to what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a copy of this again. I call it entrance. I'm gonna put it here. So, let's grab this. So this whole scene does have a bit of an off rotation, but it's fine. We'll live. So now what I want to do is I want to edit this. And I kind of want to abuse this a little bit. So what do I mean by that? So the first thing is I'm going to delete the spotlight. I'm going to this guy here. I'm going to unlock this. And now what I want to do is I kind of want to scale it in a weird way. Kind of want to make it rather large. Kind of like this, maybe. And it's going to make sense in a second. I'm going to move this in, and I'm just going to do it like this for now. Let's compie and save this. And now that we have a rather large light source, what I want to add is a rectangular light source. And I'm just going to make this like super bright so I see what I'm actually doing in which way is rotated and all that. We are not seeing anything, though. Why is that? What happened to my light source here? Okay, this is very interesting. Where did it go? Did I accidentally delete this guy? There we go. So we have this and I kind of want it to be colder as well. I think that's quite nice. And what I also want is I want to really crank the scattering. So I'm trying like 20 or 50. Yeah. So I get some really nice from this. Because I kind of want to see it a bit from here. Like, kind of like this. Similar to what I have here with the gas station. Maybe a little bit less. I'm going to do like 35 now. So This is so weird. So I hit compile and it basically disappears. That is the weirdest thing I have seen in a very long time. And I can't even delete it. It's just gone. It's called light ceiling. Yeah, it basically just kills itself for whatever reason, until I drag it in again. Well, I won't give up now that it's compiled, I think we may be able to keep it. Okay. So we kind of have this now. Does the job. All right. Let's play it safe and save this. All right. So what I wanted to do next was do a nice nighttime scenario. So for this, I will be abusing the overcast lighting layer here. Also, I noticed something, and I am actually rather ashamed. I just noticed why this light disappears here all the time because I had the overcast layer double clicked. I'm probably going to have three of these now when I turn this off and turn this one on, there we go. So that was very, very smart of me. I didn't notice that I had the other one selected. So let's delete these. And this one, we move it into the main level, which is where it belongs. Sorry for that. That was a bit confusing. So now let's abuse the overcast layer to do our nighttime. Nighttime is often considered to be quite difficult to do, for me, it's usually I don't think it's that difficult. I just think the most important thing is really what do you actually want? Because if you look at photography, for example, and you look at some proper nighttime, nighttime actually looks not the way it does when you go to the cinema. There's this thing that we always think that night is blue, and that is actually wrong. Moonlight is actually more reddish. Because it still is reflecting the sun. So the blue thing is a certain optical phenomenon. And for us, it kind of feels more natural because we're so used to it also from, like, the movies and stuff like that. So if you want to make a very realistic night, then you actually don't really make it that blue. You make it a bit more neutral. And real night is also super dark, like super dark. Which is when you see photos, for example, like this here, you can see that everything is just pitch black, and this is the only stuff that's visible. That is how dark night is. The only thing that does make night a bit brighter is moonlight, and stuff like this is not even proper night. And it's also color graded to be this blue. This is a lot more realistic, but you can see this is after sunset and it still is incredibly dark in certain ways. Proper night looks like this. What you have to do when you do night is first you have to decide where will you actually be from a stylistic point of view. For this, we're going to do something more I would argue a bit more of a cinematic night and not a super pitch black one. Because looking at this, we have it already here. This is already a pretty pitch black night if we take this. Now what we could do, if we look at this here, how the lights behave, and then we look at this, very, very similar, not a huge thing here. What we could do, for example, just making sure the right layer selected here, we could just add our exponential height fog. And we can just, like, add some vollometrics here to this whole thing. So everything feels a bit more mystical or something like that, right? But again, you wouldn't really see anything. And then you could choose any kind of cube map if you would want and just add, a little bit to it. So for example, you could just go in here, light, skylight, bring that in, set it to movable. And then you could say, like, we use a specified cube map for this. And if I go into my HDR collection, that could be anything now. I'm just going to do I'm just going to use this now, and I'm going to make it very, very, very dark. Actually, I can't use this one because it's not a texture cube, I have imported it differently. So, honestly, I'm just going to use this one now, just for the sake of it, because this is an example. So I'm going to put this in so it's working. Boom. One thing that is important now to know, here I have this PPB night and the only thing that I did was I locked the EV to four. Now you can see that due to the skylight, we just have this very, very faint thing where we can see something. So it is not fully black anymore. It is rather red, and that is, of course, because the texture that we're using is rather red. We could obviously tint or offset that, make it a bit more neutral, it gets darker because we do that, so we could add some brightness. And now slowly, we're getting a faint thing of something. Working through this and applying some more fog and stuff, that would be the more realistic route to take. However, we're not going to do it this way. So I'm just going to keep my skylight here. I will go to my engine folder and search for the beautiful sphere here, my additive sphere. Going to search for shadow, turn all of this off. Then I want to mention one thing that I forgot to mention in all the sessions before. But if you want to play this and you use the additive sphere, you may not be able to spawn into your world because the Aditi sphere does have collision. So what you can and should do is in the collision preset default, you should set it to no collision. And then when you spawn into the world as an actual player, there won't be any problems with this. So sorry for mentioning this so late, but usually I built only stuff to look at with this, so I forgot to mention. Now for the HDR, it is really, really difficult to find good night sky HDRs. I'm going to use this one, and there's one really big problem that we can see in here, and that is that there's a little black dot because sometimes these are a bit weird when there's the free ones, but we're not going to get bothered by this now. But there is a lot of light pollution here. And since we are in the desert, there wouldn't really be light pollution. But the problem is also that, for example, this texture here, there we have a lot of trees. So we would actually see the trees in the distance. Finding the right HDRs can be a very big undertaking, and I would also recommend that you should probably buy some because the free ones they always have trees or stuff in them, so I wouldn't necessarily recommend them a lot. But so you're aware of this. It is rather tricky to find good night sky HDRs. And for this session, I'm just going to use what we have here. So I'm going to take this one, and you can see that it's just the default settings here, brightness set to one, using this one. And so now we're going to scale this up to 15,000 as always. And you can see there's this weird little issue that we had. Let's just ignore this for now. Now what we going to do is we just got to decide again where we want our light to come from. Since we do have the lighting here from the gas station, I would not have the light come from over here for the moon because I think it will eat away too much of what we have here. So I actually think that we should kind of keep the moon sort of where it is maybe kind of like here. So now I want the exposure to stay like this because I think this is a good nighttime exposure that we have here already. I think all these things they work rather well. We could even this is too bright now, obviously, but it makes sense because this is so much more well lit. So we're not exposing for inside, we are exposing for the outside. And you can see that there's all this artifacting going on from lumen as well, and that is just something that we have to live with right now because here, for example, these glowing rocks and then some weird stuff just happens. I think some of it might be related to the skylight like having these lower values in here, like this stuff, for example, but then again, there may also be other issues by just lumen being lumen. So this is not really something that we can do much about right now, but we could potentially try to edit some of it in Photoshop and make it go away. So now what we need to do is we need to sort of decide how bright this is going to be. And since we said it is going to be more of like a filmic night instead of a super realistic night. I think something like this could work quite well. We just want to recapture this to make sure. But you can see this is still very, very dark. So there is not really a lot coming from this guy. So this is the moment where you basically have to manually go in and do things. Can see a little bit, but it's not really much. So let's just see. So if I put this to five, you can obviously see we're getting a lot. And now we have quite a disconnect because we're not getting as much color as we should. We also have the bottom in here and like the edges where it's just way too much warm color. So now you can do two different things. You can either, like, make this more blue or tint the light color. So let's try both approaches here. And the first is going to be tinting the HDR. So we're just going to do this, and then this, convert to parameter, go it color. And per default, we want this to just be white. So there's nothing really happening. So now, with this here, we could go in and start tinting this really blue. So let's do this and then build Yep so now we can clearly see how all of this has gotten more blue. We still do have some weird stuff happening here from umen, which is a bit unfortunate. But now we can see that we clearly have something that is a lot more nighttime ish. It does look a little bit disconnected, though, so we do need to work with our fog here quite a bit. And the first thing that we need to touch here is our end scattering, and we want this to be nice and blue as well. And we do want to tweak this tastefully. So this is already helping us here. So now what we definitely need to do is we need to start adding in the things that are important here as well, so we have a complete picture. So we need to do our sunlight here because since we have a moon, we need to add this, and I will bring this over here. And we need to make sure that we are kind of, like, here. And then we are way too steep. So we need to flatten this quite a bit. And now it gets interesting. So the first thing is that we really need to balance these out quite properly. So what I like to do is, I like to go to the skylight. And I'll turn it off. And now the only thing that we have here is our moonlight, right. And moonlight, generally speaking, is very dark. So with exposures and stuff like that, you have to be very, very careful. And also, moonlight is usually more on the white to reddish spectrum. However, since we're going to go with a movie night here, what we need to do is we need to make this basically bluish. That is usually the way that you fake moonlight in a good way. And now we need to justmooz in the brightness. And here's the thing we need to be careful because when we go to this blue, since all the rocks are red, we're creating purple. So we need to be very careful here what type of color schmooze in. And we go back to our skylight. We turn this back on. And now we see that it's way too bright. Let's go maybe back to one, two, because we just want to get this subtle fill here so we can see things, right? So this is already a lot better. And this is way more, as I mentioned, obviously, this kind of, like, movie night thing, right? It is really about the careful balance here because you just don't want any of these to be too much, but you want to have that visibility that we're getting here. You want to be able to see the stars nicely. Then there's also this argument where you could say, Hey, in films, there's this thing that is called day to night, which usually involves color grading. They film it in day and then they grade it to look like night. You could say, why don't we do that? Well, we really could if we would want to B in this sense, is that the old? Yeah. We could do that. But the thing is, it gives a very specific look, a very, very specific look, and it always depends on if you want that or not. So now I would just work here a little bit with the exposure compensation to really nail in the look that we want. And I would go back to the fog, and I think we could, like 0.05 thicken this a little bit, kind of like this. So now we're starting to get somewhere. So these are a little bit over tweaked now here. Yeah. We could just, like, bring them down a little bit. Something like this. So this is actually starting to be quite nice here. So if we do this, we actually do have a pretty good shot here and some really good readability. Curious if we just go in here and do a little bit more Yep. So I think this looks pretty good. So let's just save this. I'm curious now what this is going to save here. I'm just gonna do this. No one knows what's gonna happen. But as you see, it's actually really quick and straightforward to create different scenarios and have some nice values and stuff once you actually have nailed in the fundamentals. So you can then just go in and play with the exposure ranges and all that. Personally, I like when stuff is dark but not fully black. So you can see here the road sign, it's very dark, but we can still read it. So it is not really like broken in a sense that it's, like, unreadable or something like that. So I think this works really, really well here. Still waiting for this to save. Alright, there you go. I think in this one, actually, I overrode the exposure. So we can actually do quite some cool stuff here with the phone booth. Let's Let's try that. That is pretty cool. So now what we obviously can do here is we can actually adjust some of the things to our liking here. So if we go into the color grading, there's obviously the simplest one, which is the temperature here. And this is always something you can make it more warm or more cold. Actually, here, I think, N I do prefer more cold. But one thing that I think is really important is when you do the color grading, a lot of people, they go into the global and global is fine when you do stuff like saturation or contrast, but I wouldn't do it, excuse me, for color adjustments too much. Then some people go into the shadows. The problem with the shadows, I feel like is if I go into here, let's say I'm going to make some of it green, I'm creating this really weird, obviously, this is too much, right? But I'm creating this kind of split toning effect, and I just don't really think it looks good most of the times. So what I usually grade is I actually grade the mid tones a tiny little bit. So this is also again, it's too much. So I grate them a tiny little bit. And then if I feel like I just want a little bit more, I will grate the shadows very, very slightly. But the thing is, if you have too big of a separation between the color and the shadows and the mid tones, you get the split toning effect, and it's not really what you want. So you can see it's just very subtle this one now here feels a bit more purplish in the background, and when I offset it here, we're going to get a cooler feeling. And the same, we can see it here on the light as well. So this is totally something we could do. So I'm just going to capture this. And I want to capture this one as well. All right. Yeah, this is a way to do something like this. One thing that I just want to super quickly do because I think it's really a lot of fun. I thought for the nighttime, it would also be interesting to play with the atmosphere. If we add that in And we make this. Yeah, we don't see as much from it as we had when we did the daytime thing. So let's do this. And go into the fog here. No, that is way too much. Something like this. So this is completely not working, which is fine because what I wanted to do was to go into this really misty scenario, but we do need a lot more basic light because now I'm just cranking up all the settings and the thing is, it is basically way too dark here to do that. Actually, absolutely no problem here. H so what we could do is we could do, as always, just reset this and go with an overcast sky and then create like a thick fog or something. But overall, this is, again, the way how you can really quickly adjust all these things, get a good setup going, and it took us maybe 20 minutes to do this. It sometimes takes a bit longer, obviously, because you're kind of, like, trying to figure out, for example, which texture works the best and all these kind of things. So it's always a little bit a trial and error process, even for me because I never know exactly what I'm going to get. Here, for example, it is quite dark, you may want to change that here and say, I want to do something where I look at this tree in the night, so you would potentially then place a camera here, and even though your settings are actually good, you would most likely go in and try to adjust it a bit. But then again, you never really should do it too bright unless gameplay reasons. So that's also something important to keep in mind, because for gameplay, that is one of the things unless you're doing a survival game. For gameplay reasons, night should always be a little bit more on the brighter side. So there is some good visibility. So, yeah, that's how we do nighttime. Thank you so much for 25. Final Lighting Polish: Hello, and welcome to the next session. So all the times before, we've looked at static sky boxes using HDR images. And for me personally, this still gives the most control and potentially also the highest quality since you have more control over the cube map, what the sky actually does. So the sky lighting can be a little bit more sophisticated. But obviously, that's not the only way to do it. I do like this a lot when I have a fixed scenario. So I would most of the time always prefer a HDR sky workflow over something else. However, now that we have Lumen and we actually do have some proper well, dynamic global illumination and lighting in general. Obviously, one of the things that we can do is have a fully dynamic sky system. But I want to just quickly change my pool size here again because it's probably going to complain. So we do have a fully dynamic sky system that we can use now. For this reason, I created a dynamic sky layer. We still have our post process volume base, and all of this basically starts with a few basic components. So we can add a directional light. We can add a sky atmosphere, and we can add a skylight here. So these are the basic components. Now, one thing that we want to do is we want to change this to movable and we also want to change this to real time capture, so it actually updates all our changes that we do per frame. So am I actually getting some decent lighting here? Yo, so now one important thing to understand here is you may remember how I've talked about these differences of, like, how the sky is balanced out against the sun. So the important thing is when you use the sky atmosphere simulation, it's more or less like you don't necessarily have the full control over these things because the way that it works is it is just a lot more simulated. So the intensity of your sky is defined by the intensity of your sun. So if I say, this is like a super hot day, right? So let's do like our 100,000 x again. So you can see it just levels it out, and it's kind of like the same again here. So there's not really a lot of difference in that sense. So it just tries to make it work anyways. And you can't really control how bright the sky is compared to how bright is the sun. So one thing that is important, though, is when you have your sun here, and I'm just going to dig this up a bit. One thing that is important is when you lower your sun like this, it will actually get slowly darker. That's one thing. I will lose intensity and you don't see it here, it will also tint its color. So it will become more red, based on the colour temperature that would be accurate. So this all is great. However, it really means that the only controls that you have are like your exposure in that sense. So like, right now, for example, I feel like my exposure is way too bright, so I could go in and get my post process volume here, call it PPB dynamic sky. Then just to do it quick and dirty, I could just offset it here and we won't see it because I haven't checked unbound. So, I could just then control the sort of intensity of the values kind of like this. So I think that this, for example, looks a bit more pleasing. So that is obviously a very, very nice thing to do. Now this still looks a little bit empty, and that is because we don't really have any fog here that is not like the atmospheric fog. So we only have or basically nothing. So we need to add our exponential height fog. One thing that I mentioned before is you can see that these colors here are set to black, and that is because when you go into your project settings, you can do this hight. So here, it just search for hit fog. You get support sky atmosphere affecting height fog. And that is really important because if these colors are not black and the setting is not turned on, you can see how the height fog is now basically like orange or almost almost purple, right? And the more I like roll around here, you can see how the height fog changes the colors based on what the sky actually looks like. And this is actually really, really nice. So here we can see, Yeah, this is beautiful. So without this setting, the height fog would completely be disconnected all the time. And you may remember when I had to change the colors on the height fog to be super strong, like way above one. And that was because the height fog was basically disconnected from all the other values. Now I don't have to overwrite these colors, even though I am using physical units, which is this very bright sun of 100,000. However, since it gets the values from the sky atmosphere, it will all be in sync. And now we get these, really, really nice values here, right? So this is all pretty beautiful. And then, of course, we can control more like density and things like that. But this is the basic of the dynamic sky and I just want to quickly go in here and adjust this a little bit. Make it a little bit brighter. Maybe a bit more. Whoops, -0.2 was the intention. So now you can see that we get something really, really nice here, and we get good readability. We get nice blue shadows here. We get the bounds. So this all works just as before and actually all quite simple here. And we do have our auto exposure on. So we still do get the adjustment, but I'm just offsetting it a little bit, so it doesn't get so overly bright. So that's one thing here. Now, the next thing that we can also do is right now we don't have any clouds. So having clouds with this used to be a lot more difficult. Now, however, we can just I think it is in here. Yeah, we can just add the volumetric Cloud actor, and what we get is some really, really bad looking clouds. So one thing that I would like to tell anyone is Please don't use these clouds. Like, so often I see like portfolio stuff where, like, someone just, like, throws this in and goes like, Yeah, volumetric clouds. Whoo. And then I see this and the actual portfolio seed looks like super good, right? Like this environment, for example. Like if I go I don't know, like back here. And we just like, Look at this. This is like, beautiful, but these clouds just completely destroy the illusion of that this might actually be something super realistic because no clouds look like this. And that is something that makes me a little bit sad because before the volumetric clouds, there was another default gido from Epic, and it just saddens me that Epic always provides the worst looking default thing they can even though they release, like, demo content that has way better looking stuff. Like, for example, the sky that comes with the valley of the ancient looks so much better. And then I see so many people just dropping the defaults guy dome, like the old Unreal four defaults Guidom, for example, or this thing into this scene, and it just looks really bad. I'm very sorry. This just does not look natural. So how can we fix this? So I hope it's going to work now, because, like, I've had some issues getting this to work, to be honest, it doesn't work consistently. However, if you go into your plugins folder here and you search for volume, you get this volumetric, and this is a library of stuff and blueprints and textures and all these kind of things that or have to do with volumetric. And there's a bunch of really helpful stuff in here. So in the content browser, you could go to engine, plugins. And then here we have the volumetrics content. And here we do have a bunch of materials. So I think this is the stuff that we can use here. Let's see if it's working. Doesn't do anything. So we might need to trial an error a little bit here because some of them, I got them to work when I tried this the last time because the paint clouds, they don't I was just there. I don't get it. So this is the thing that I had with this where it just appeared for a super short amount of time, and then it just went away. So how I changed this. Nothing happens. So this is really Sorry, what's the red thing here? Never seen this one before. It might be the wind force. That is possible. Anyways, so let's try and see if we can actually find one that works because, again, they are not very, very nice otherwise. And some have the paint in it, and the paint, it means that you need to turn on the cloud painting plug in for this to work, and then you need to, like, paint the clouds in, and you need to set up a render target and all these kinds of things. And that goes a little bit beyond the scope for what we're doing here. So I'm really just trying to find a shader that hopefully quick and dirty does the job. Oh, actually, I realized that this one, too, has a render target. I think what we could do is just replace the render target with white because I think all the ones that use the render target are the ones that need to be painted. And this one needs to be painted, too. I'm just like, I'm sorry. So let's try this. Let's go in here. We go here. And let's try to fix this. Taktra sample here, here. And these you can see, these are the volumetric textures, and here is the render targets. And I'm just going to apply this. I have no idea what's going to happen, but this is half the fun. Just like trying to find brows this one again. They all have that no target thing. Uh, which is a bit frustrating. See, this is why it's so difficult to get, like, proper clouds because you can't just use one of these. But I think I should sort of be able to set some of these. So they're all based on this one, and we have sky texture scale in kilometers. Is this not based on the same fader? It is. Here. Let's try if we can actually change something here. Well, this is looking very bad. Great stuff. I think this is the bad one. It is. God, I hate it so much. These are all the others. I guess we just for now have to live with this. I feel very bad because usually I build my own. I've been digging quite a bit into this, but not the way the epic materials are done with all the render targets and that kind of stuff. So can't really talk much about that. But here's a few things that is pretty cool with the clouds. So right now you can see that the sun is behind the clouds, but not really much is happening. So what we can do is we can I always forget in which one it is, but it might actually be in the directional light. So in the directional light, here. We can do cast shadows on clouds and that can quite often not make a huge difference. It's always depends a little bit. Cast shadows on atmosphere is pretty cool, but then cast cloud shadows is this here. And the cool thing with this is that now the clouds are actually casting shadow onto the terrain. So now they're just so huge that everything is kind of in shadow, which is a little bit unfortunate because we just don't really have that kind of, like, good looking clouds right now. And there's a bunch of, like, a lot of parameters that we can do here. But this basically replaces the light function to cast shadow from the sun. And you can see that if I move the sun over here, you can see that like right now, we do have sun here, and we do have shadow back there. So this is kind of, like, really, really nice. And when you have the shadow on atmosphere and stuff like that, that means that if you have a very thick atmosphere, you will get basically God rays coming through the clouds from the atmosphere. So let's see if I just kind of wasn't this one. I think it was this one that made it more like So I haven't done these quite in a long time, but we should in theory, based on atmosphere, thickness, get more Gdrays. And it is pretty hard, again, because these clouds don't have a lot of room here to do good stuff. But you can see how we get a really nice sky simulation going. And one thing that I wanted to look at with this as well if we go to our post process volume base, you may remember that I said that the lens flares look really, really bad. And I also said, please don't ever use this because this is basically the thing that I see when there's a game on the market and there's an unreal game, and I just look at this, and I just it very, very, very bad. So you usually don't want that. However, real cameras have profiles for this, and I found this really cool website on Pentax forums. You can see it up here, where there are a bunch of nerds, like real nerds. They do like scientific stuff here. It's like these guys. And they started basically sampling these camera profiles, and you can see this is the lens profile here or like they call it what do they call it? So I mean it is the bouquet, but there's a PSF, I think, circular PSF. That's what they call it. And here you have these kind of textures. And this stuff is kind of what you want to a certain degree when you work with these elements. So I'm just going to download one of these into my textures folder. And you kind of, like, please don't use these. So you kind of want to have a decent texture here, and I'm just gonna go in to my lighting folder here. And then I'm just gonna drag this in and of course, this has probably a weird size now at 896 by 862. You kind of want to give this some treatment, make it proper like 512 by 512 or something. But for now, we're going to roll like this. So the first thing we want to do is that you do this thing, and you can see it still kind of looks really ******. So we may need to look at our texture settings here. So we do have no MIP maps that is good already. This all looks good. Does this make any difference? I don't think it should so this might actually be a limitation for unreal itself, how they have changed it potentially because this did not always be this pixelated, and I think the texture we can all see here is pretty good here. I'm going to try. Sometimes using the texture group can help Is this making any difference? That is very, very unfortunate. I'm going to try one more thing because there used to be the vector displacement. Not here anymore. So this is all good here because you don't want this to be streamed and all that. You want this to be the highest fidelity possible. But as we can see, it doesn't really work. So one thing that I don't like is the coloring and also like the way some of these are distributed. So I think that this here is the position. Here you can see that we can offset it with the Alpha, so we can create opposite artifacts here as well. It's behind the sun, right? That is one really cool thing, and then we can also dig in here and we can change the color. Honestly, it makes me a little bit furious that the resolution is so low because unreal, the resolution unreal four, that is the resolution was not that low. This already looks a bit better. And then we can just slowly go in and tweak all these elements. So this one is here, and we kind of want to have it more orange, I presume, so this is just how you go through these. One thing that I also like to do is I usually like to scale them up quite a bit, and now for some reason, they got a lot softer, which is more how I remember as being. So you can at least try to do something a little bit with these so to make them not look as generic as they used to. So I'm just going to do this, and I make this like purple, and then I'm going to take the next one and bring it way closer. Kind of like this. So now it's flipped, but it still gives me kind of like what I want. And then we take this guy. And then we take this guy. And this one, we make it purple again. And then we take this guy. And where's the last one? Let's have a look at this one. So I think we want to move these all in a little bit more. So this guy will go here and this guy. Okay. I really want these. I think the problem is that I moved this the other way around. So I want them to be a little bit closer. So it's by no means perfect, right? However, I think that it still gives a bit more a bit more like something that works a bit nicer and then just move them all back. Yeah. So we got this guy. I'm done. So it just kind of want to space them out in a proper way. And obviously, it is a bit too intense right now, which is completely fine. Because, like, what we'll do is we'll kind of, like, tone them down eventually a little bit. So our intensity is going to be a lot lower. So it's not in our face. But again, this is not the most beautiful lens flare, but at least this looks so much better than the stock lens flare. And again, you can tweak the distances and all these kind of things like quite a lot. So that is definitely one way to do things and just improve it. And then let's see because the screen dirt feature was kind of broken a little bit in reel four. And when the lens flare hits and you have some screen dirt, the elements actually combine. And the screen dirt here is this thing, the dirt mask. And there used to be something, yeah, like this thing. And it basically gets triggered when light hits it. And again, I don't know if it still works. It kind of used to work. I think I'm seeing something here. This one is probably the screen dirt. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll get it. So here you can see the screen dirt now, and it gets triggered more when the lens flare also hits it a bit. So you can get some nice combined shapes here with the lens flare. And these things, like, obviously, this is just the cheapest texture that I got. But these things, they can work really well in tandem to make it just look a little bit better than it usually does. But it needs, again, it needs some careful tweaking. And the careful tweaking can take quite some time, this might be a bit too much here. But then also if I take my camera here and I'll just duplicate this. Like, you know, you can start. This is obviously very bright now here. But you can get some stuff that does not look Well, super ******. Let's call it that. So you can get something a lot more natural this way. And I think this works quite well. So how about we take this and then we go out of my camera. We pin this and then take our directional light I'd bring it over. And now it would be kind of beautiful to not have the clouds here. So now we have something pretty cool here. But now, one thing that I would like to quickly try and then I think we're pretty much done here. We've covered a lot of content so far. We've covered a lot of tricks. So I would like to see if I can do something cool with this cloud material, even though it is not that great. So let's go into the clouds here. Let's open this up. Okay. Wow. Okay. That is very sensitive. So what I'm trying to do here is I'm trying to figure out, yeah, yeah. Kind of trying to get more coverage. Nope, that's less. What is beer powder? Why do clouds have beer powder? Yeah, well, I think this one here might be my best bet to get something. Or not. There we go. This is a lot more overcast. Okay. So let's do this. So overcast is one of the most tricky things to do because with overcast, as you can see here, we don't really have a sun. And the only light source that we have is pretty much the sky. And then usually it is also the case that the sky is incredibly white, so like this more so we have a very strong top light is what I call it. Additionally, quite often, there is a little bit of moisture in the air, so stuff looks a bit wet and we get this very strong top shem. And it is not very, very easy to do. And of course, things look very flat, which is the reason that when you go out for three D scanning, you really kind of want to use overcast. So everything looks kind of unlit almost. So it's the best conditions to sort of, like, do this. Now, I want, though, that this looks a lot more locked in in terms of, I want this to really shine here. So I think we should start at maybe eight. And then of course, what we need to do is we need to tweak our directional light because remember, now the whole atmosphere is lit by the intensity of the directional light. So if this is overcast, maybe something like 5,000 will do. It's still very bright. So we don't really have a lot of sun here available right now. So we can clearly see this. And then in our fog or actually in our sky atmosphere, we probably want some more of this. So we're already getting a lot more fog here, and this is starting to look pretty cool. And the lights are quite still nice brightness and all that. One thing that really annoys me is the way that the emissive surfaces render over distance. So this is not really something that I can do much. I would need to research this a bit better. It can be nanite related, but then on the other hand, also, one thing that has a difference here is the screen percentage. So it just becomes cleaner with higher resolution, obviously. So this is a little bit one might say unfortunate. So now going in here, turning on the volumetrics and then cranking this fog density ever so slightly. And I think we need a lot more. Also one thing that we can do here, you can see how the volumetric is leaking out. So we can just take this, open the blueprint. And on the rectangular light here, if we scroll down, we can say cast Volmetric shadow. And now you can see that it sort of respects the geometry more, so it doesn't leak as much, so it actually creates a shadow here from it. So it looks a lot less leaky. So one thing now that I can see here is that I'm sort of feeling that this is a little bit not foggy enough just yet. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to start to increase the extinction here a little bit. Let's say two. And now what we can also do is we can go into our skylight here, and the skylight has a volumetric scattering intensity. So we can this seems to be Oh, this one actually doesn't work. That is very interesting. So this used to work quite a bit here. For some reason, it doesn't seem to do so. So the only way here for us now is to really work with the fog itself. So, for example, something like this. And we can obviously, see that the rectangular light has way too much scattering. It's started to annoy me a little bit. So we're just going to lower this. So this is pretty cool, but I'm not really getting exactly the feeling that I would want from this. So how would we go about this? So now I think that this is a cool time to play around with a bunch of things here. So we can first darken our skylight a little bit, kind of like this. And now what we can do in our PPB dynamic, now we can actually try and move this into the direction that we want via some color grading. And again, the importance with the color grading is to be very, how should I put it? You overdo it rather quickly. So the first thing that we can do is we can just touch this one a little bit here and make it cooler. You can see we can go quite a lot with this, and this would be something where I'd say, this is a bit too much. So we kind of want just a little bit here. And now in Global, I would probably do a tiny, little bit of desaturation on this. Then we can go with a tiny, little bit more contrast, we're just slowly getting there. And then I would go into the mid tones and I usually use the gain setting because you don't want to go into the saturation and do weird stuff to the colors because it just goes haywire. Gamma is also a little bit I don't know, it's not as intuitive, I feel like. It can work quite well, but I usually use the gain. But also, one thing I have to say is I move them around a bit and see what works best for me. And this one I kind of like it because when you do this, you actually get this little offset here with the lights where, of course, this is too bright. We would need to fix the exposure, but they become like a different tint through that, and it's something that is very common when you look at, for example, like movie grading that the fires are not reddish, but they're instead, more yellow. So now that we have this, We can start here. I do some quite interesting stuff. Now, one thing that I'm noticing is we are using a lot of saturation here. What I'm doing right now off screen is I'm just actually saturating the golden glow a little bit more. And maybe I want to give them a little bit more here, just made these lamps a bit brighter. Then again, it's always a little bit tricky when the fog conditions change all the time, so you kind of want to tweak the volumetric scattering for when you have a really strong thing going like a strong fog, and I think this looks a lot better. And, you know, we're almost getting a little bit of Simon Stalinhog vibes here. So I kind of want to bring this down a little bit. And, of course, like this stuff is kind of like similar to the gamma sliders and these things. But you can really, like, crank in some cinematic contrast here doing these things. So now we have a pretty nice shot here, I would say. I'm pretty cool and foggy, and it just kind of, like, feels yeah, like, very cinematic, I would argue. So let's do another high resolution screenshot of this. All right. Gonna move out here. Gonna duplicate this. Here's the thing that's very interesting. So here you can see that there's quite some leaking and there might be two reasons for this. Reason number one is we're not casting volumetric shadow. Reason number two could be that it is too thin of a geometry. So what we can do here is, need to move in, get the lamp. It the blueprint, go to the point light here, and then again, also do castometric shadow, which is probably going to completely destroy the performance. But hey, so much better now. It's a bit hard right now for me to find a really nice angle because the sun is completely busting through my window. And, of course, this is a rather dark scene. Yeah. I think this works quite well. Now, looking at what we've done here. I think we had a few really good shots here that we could do. Been working on this. We started with some really nice daytime stuff, got the interior to work well, made a bunch of different scenarios here. So overall, I think all this worked really, really well together. And this is going to be the end of this course now. I hope everybody found it, like, interesting, had fun following along with the things. Most importantly, also, we're able to take away a few good things for working with lighting and unreal. I just want to stress again that a lot of these tools right now are still heavily work in progress. On real five, even though it looks super slick on the surface, there's still quite a lot of things that just are not yet as stable as On real four is. So that is just always something to keep in mind, like the stuff that I showed when flying around here as well, that some things just kind of don't work or that there's some weird leaking from the skylight coming in, like, all these kind of things. I can see right now here some artifacting from the fog when I move my camera. There's just always going to be a few little things that are not potentially as far ahead. So please keep that in mind. I've been trying here also my best to work with this very, very new technology, and it's just normal that there can be little issues or that things don't always exactly work the way they should. So with that out of the way, again, thank you so much for watching and have a good time. 26. Bonus Lighting The Scene In Your Source Files: Hey. Hello and welcome to another round of Lighting tutorials with Fast Track tutorials and me, Tillman Milda. So this is a little bit of a special one here today. And the reason why we're getting this is we've gotten a lot of feedback on that it's not always optimal to not provide source material for the stuff that we've been doing. And as explained, we couldn't really with the other tutorial series because we don't own the content. So Emil and me, we had a bit of a chat, and we thought it would be really cool to still give you something that it's not the same thing as the course itself, but at least you will get some files that you can, like, dig through. You can see how things are done in a certain way. I said, like, Yeah, let's do it. Give me something that I can just, like, relight. Do my thing and that you are willing to share with the community. So he decided that I could use his Roman Empire environment thing here. And so this is the thing that was released. It's a tutorial on how to create this, and you can buy it on all the channels where this is being sold. So I got a simular scene to this. It is a little bit different because there are still some assets in here that we're not allowed to share. Like, there are a bunch of megascin statues in here and all that kind of stuff. And I did not fully know that. And I'm going to tell you all this now because I did also add some of my own modifications to the scene that I got. However, they are not really necessary for the lighting to stand out or anything like that. It was more like, for me, I needed something that it feels a bit more like, thorough and complete. So this is the scene from the course that you can get. Then here is the scene that I got. And you can see, obviously, it does look a little bit different so we have three camera shots in here. So that's the first one I'm looking at. This is the second one. This is the third one. And if I just uncheck this here or eject from here, let's call it that. So you can see this is the scene. And this is a really quick and dirty conversion to Unreal five. Not really, like using Nanite and stuff. And there were a bunch of problems here with some shaders, like ending up being fully black. And you can see this scene is pretty straightforward. So this is not really meant to be like an explorable environment or anything like that. It's more about, like, how to build like structures like this and those kind of things. So what I did is, I went through the scene and well, edit a lot of stuff for myself, just so I get more towards the thing that I feel like I want to do with this scene. But I also did remove a bunch of things, changed a bunch of things here and there, just to get it to feel more complete for my brain and for I wanted to do with it. So again, this is the original scene. And if I go out here of Game view, we can see, there's a bunch of things here. So, for example, there's also like these floating lights here that do, like, a bunch of things. So you can see here that it does have a little bit of an effect here. And to me, that is sort of like, you know, that's more like movie set kind of stuff, like adding a bit of, like, fake bounds here and there. It sort of like emphasizes on the color of the sand, making this work more So there's a bunch of these things. And if you remember, from the last tutorial session, I said that I personally, I'm not a very big fan of these movie lights. I do think they are absolutely justified for many different kinds of work, but, like, usually, like, for just like environmental work, I don't really, like, do a lot of these things where you can see, you know, just like adding some, like, highlight here because remember that I said that I really appreciate this, like, holistic approach to lighting. So I always try to build something that does provide certain interest anyways that provide certain cool things that I would like to look at. So that is definitely something that I was thinking about when I was approaching this. And I just basically made a copy of this scene, and then I went through it, and, like, changed things based on how I felt it would work and all that kind of stuff. And usually what I do is when I get a scene, right, like, the first thing that I do is I usually go in here into the buffer, and after I've been checking for, like, floating lights and things like that, I do have a look at the base color. And this is by no means intended to discredit Emil here because he did a great job with this. But this is also something that comes from my own experience as a lighting artist for pretty much like ten years, working on many, many big titles, many, many extensive titles with a lot of content, where we also, like, to manage all these things. And when I look at this, there is one thing that I immediately see that is not really let's call it not working well for me. And I think that we can agree on when we look at this, this is by no means bad at all. But I would argue it is not very striking. Like, this is a very cool shot here for the camera. It's a great perspective. It's very dynamic, but I don't think that this image is striking. So what I did, and I actually forgot to open this beforehand, so I'm just going to do it again. So just bear with me here on the other screen. Uh so what I did was, I obviously, like, Googled around for, like, reference and stuff like that. And this is a Roman temple, right? So when we look at these materials that they are built from, this one is very interesting here. I like these ones a lot. And the thing is that these temples and the material that they're made from is, like, super bright. It's incredibly bright. And that is the reason why you do get a lot of sexy bound sliding, like you can see here. We do get a lot of really nice bonds here, too. Like, that is more weathered and all that. And of course, you have, like, stuff like this. But also, like these things, you know, it's always like, colour temperature and, like, how the photos are tweaked and stuff like that. But overall, speaking, they had the materials, well, yeah, the materials are very bright. And this stuff here is, in my humble opinion, too dark. So I like, if I want to do, like, something really striking, so let's let's, let's go like, um, uh, I always like, sometimes I just add the word epic, and then you get, like, the cool stuff here. So, if you want to really have these cool things with, like, a lot of range and contrast, you can't really get this because, like, when your colors are saturated and dark already, you cannot really work with the lighting that well, excuse me. There's also, like, other stuff that's interesting, if you look at uh If you look at paintings, for example, that can be like, very, very interesting, you know, to get, like, a look like this, for example, where it's just, like, it's really, really nice and well balanced, right? And things like that, depending on what you're shooting for, but, like, nevertheless, they always need the flexibility when it comes to your base colors. So usually we end up making base colors too dark or too saturated. It is incredibly common that this happens. So again, you're not like trying to call out Emil or so it's more like for everybody, you need to keep that in mind. And it's one of the things that I even have seasoned artists at Die still sometimes not saying they do it wrong, but they may not choose the, like, the really good value for something. So that is one thing that you always want to look at first. So that is definitely something that I needed to touch here. Then one thing that I also like to do is I like to do always some research just on the subject itself, which in this case, is a Roman Empire. And one thing that did rub me a bit the wrong way, if I might say so is the choice to use the color blue. And the reason for that is because the Roman Empire colors are red and gold. There's a lot of evidence for that. When you look at reference, they had, like, red roofs. They had, like, red paint and gold ornaments. So if you look at the flag, if you look at Roman empire, plaque or something like that. You know, it's red and gold. So these are the colors of the Roman Empire. So what I thought was, like, to me, this actually doesn't really sell as Roman Empire. What this sells to me is Greek. But it also doesn't really sell, like, Greek stuff either because it's different from, like, you know, like the architecture is not Greek. So this is Roman architecture, which is similar to Greek architecture, though. But with, like, colors that are more what was common in Greece. I mean, in Greece, they had, like, the red terra cotta roofs and stuff. But they used a lot more blue with their, like, when they painted stuff. So that was something that I wanted to sort of work through as well. Then here right now, we are using the fully dynamic sky system with the volumetric clouds. And as I have mentioned before, I do not personally use this because I don't think it looks good. And now you may think, like, Well, like, are you ever using, like, proper like, dynamic sky stuff and all that? I'm like, Yes, I do. But the thing is, like, I have built my own cloud shaders in the past, and it is a pain in the butt. It's a lot of work. It's incredibly time consuming. It mostly looks very bad for a very long time. And unless you really know what you're doing, you're not going to get the clouds that you want. So I did that, and I had, like, clouds that I was kind of happy with, but then still, sometimes you want more flexibility and all these other kinds of things. And I I will advertise this now, and I hope Emil is okay with that. But the one thing that I can recommend to anybody who is really into this is the is it called ultra ultra dynamic sky, Ultra dynamic Sky. That is usually what I use when I use the volumetric clouds and dynamic time of day stuff and all that, because, like, I bought Ultraynamic Sky years ago. Literally years ago when there were no volumetric clouds and nothing. I bought it for like 20 bucks or something. And the guy who makes it like Everett Gunther or something is his name. Like he has been continuously updating that sky with the latest rendering features of Unreal, and he doesn't charge for it. So like, I got a sky like six years ago for 20 bucks, and they have all the updates for Unreal five with the volumetric clouds. It looks absolutely amazing. And the thing is, it is very easy to use. It has a lot of features. So usually I go like, why do I need to reinvent the so when I use that stuff, I use like that plug in or that content pack. And I will not use it here because, again, it is paid content, so I cannot share it with you. So what we're going to do is we going to use Sky HDR as always. And that is the way that we are going to do this. So well, again, this is what I started with. And now let's have a look at what I ended up with. So if we just go over here, I have a second version of Unreal. So this is what I ended up with. And please please ignore my ****** flags here. I just thought it was funny. I wanted to try out something. I wanted to have the scene more alive. At first, I used the cloth simulation, but it didn't really work. And then this is actually hand vertex animated in the Shader. So it does not look as great as it could, but I do think it adds a bit of flavor to this. So now you can see there's obviously a lot of things here that I kind of did, right? So I added some, like, rocks and rubble and stuff here in the foreground to make the foreground more interesting. I chose a cinematic camera actor instead of the normal one because it does come with more options for, like, proper camera tweaks. Then I downloaded the new mega scan trees that we will also not be able to share with you, sadly. But then again, you can just download them for free anyways and add them if you want. So no problem there. I added a bunch of these trees here to make it feel more alive, make it feel more like an actual space. These are some of the mega Scan garden plants. And this one is a funny one. This one is the first tree that I have ever built in my life, and it's not even done. I built it like a few years ago to illustrate something to a student, and I was like, No, no, no, no, let's do this. I'm just going to do this thing, and I'm going to show you an approach of how you can do this. And you can see this thing is, like, so undone that, you know, like, there's a you can see that here it's just filled with, like, solid green color. And I just spawned these blades here with some, like, textures on top, and there's, like, a little, you know, it's just really bad. So these are really just to get the look across in that sense, right? So, but all these things are not really essential. So and then I basically, before I added all these things, I did a texture balancing pass. So if we're going to look at the buffer visualization here again, it's got to be very bright. And that is because reasons. So let's turn the fog off here or not. Why Okay, let's do the fog, and then there should be particle sprites. So this is the way to go. So you can see that when we look at these colors here, you know, I didn't really do much to the mega scans. I think I made them a bit brighter. But like, overall, you can see if we compare these colors here to the other ones. You can see that like, they're quite dark in a lot of spaces, places, and these ones are a lot brighter. And what then allows me to do is to have a lot more cinematic contrast where the things that are in the sun actually catch some proper highlights and the shadows are still readable. Because if we go back here, this one, it just becomes really hard to create, like, something that is readable here and then there's like, the balance of light to shadow becomes really hard to manage. And that is the reason why I did that to just give you more leeway and more room. Then I also chose to change the roof colors to be red because, again, Roman empire here. I did not change the color of the paint here because that is actually a texture based paint. So I did not change that. Then you see some weird stuff in here, and there was a thing like, I think I just broke a shader at some point. So I will send this over to Emil, and he will, like, fix some things, and he will wrap this up and make it available for download. But like these things, they were not really a huge concern to me because, like, it doesn't matter too much from my point of view here. So I did all the texture balancing. I added some of the elements that I really liked. And then the next thing was to decide, so where am I actually going to put this range in? So if we go to go to our post process volume and you look at exposure, we can see that we are actually at six here, and this one is very interesting because what I did here is I worked completely by eye, and I started with something that was a bit more like a sunset kind of mood, and I did not like it at all. I thought it just didn't look the way I wanted. So this is why this is locked at EV five, and then with minus one, we end up at EV six. But if we look at this and the direction of the shadows and the length of the shadows and all that kind of stuff, we could clearly argue the point that this is definitely not a scenario that should have an exposure that low. So this would probably need something around, like eight to 12. Yeah. But, you know, sometimes these things happen. So it does look great. Everything is balanced well, but these values are not as physically plausible as they used to be with, like, how I did stuff in the main tutorial, for example. So what we could do, obviously, is we could just, like, change that, right? So if I go into my directional light here, and I look at this, and we can see this is like 2000 locks. So that is not really gonna fly. So let's just try this and try to match it up again the way it was. So if I go to my cinematic camera here, and I'm just going to go into here. And let's see. I hope I don't have any local overrides here. Yeah, that looks good. So that can be dangerous when you start overwriting things here and then you're actually tweaking in the post and like nothing works. So, let's say we want this to be more realistic. And this is like shortly after lunchtime, right? So first thing we might want to do is do this. It's very, very bright now, obviously. And also, one important thing, I'm going to put this back. I'm going to go with Snipping tool. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to just take a quick snip of this because believe it or not, usually, we're really bad with remembering things the way they're supposed to be like, like, you know, we think we know something, but our brains are really bad at remembering what it actually kind of, like, was. So we look at it, and, you know, we just do it wrong by comparing it to our memory of something. So take a snip of that to make sure that we kind of, like, nail it better. So we go like this, and then we go like this and like this. And now we have this very beautiful black image. So the first thing that we should kind of do is we should get our sky brightness back. Or, let's actually do the directional light first and try to get this somewhere. So I have no idea what this is going to be, but let's start with 75,000. So if I look at that, we can see that we are slowly getting somewhere. We're getting some nice bounds here, but we can clearly see that we're not at the same intensity yet. So it may actually be more like 100,000 And now we're starting to get some more like whiteness here, some more fill here. But of course, there's a huge thing that's missing, which is our skylight contribution. So what we now should do is we should just basically go in here. Take our sky texture and then just raise it to something that looks similar in terms of brightness to what we had before. And I will just need to look at this here. And we can already see that all the values are starting to fall in place again. So this is definitely not the same yet. I'm at 4,800, so let's go to 5,000. That was almost no difference. Let's go 6,000. So now we got some difference here. I'm just going to bring this up. And if I look at this, we are getting very close, but this one is still brighter. So let's go 7,000. Now we are starting to hit closer here. I think we are still a tat writer. Let's go. Oops. Let's go. 8,000. I compare this again here. And now it looks like we are too bright, so I'm going to go with 7,500 emissive multiplier like this. And now the most important thing, obviously, this does not look like what we had. So let's go in here, hit the skylight, and hit recapture. All right. So now we are fairly close, fairly close. So looking at this, the sun still hits hotter, so we gonna have to go to our directional light again, and we'll actually have to hit it up to 120,000 boom. Yeah. So now we're really in a very good ballpark here, right? So now we have fixed that, and we do have pretty much the same range as before. So obviously, this does look a bit weird, and that is because I have turned off a lot of things here like this. So now we're back into this and we have fixed that thing. So this whole thing, though, is a little bit more interesting than what we did before. So if I, for example, look at the skylight, right? And if I just quickly go out of this. So we do have a really nice and blue sky here from this HDR image, and I ignore that stuff because we don't see it anyways. So we have this really nice blue sky, but we do have so much red and brown in this environment. I started becoming a bit like heart for me, so to speak. So I did actually shift the skylight cue a tiny little bit towards something more blue because I think it really just helps the shot. And there is, however, a lot of magic going on in the post process volume. But before we look at the post process volume, let's look at some of the environmental effects that we have here because they are incredibly important for what we're actually seeing when we're in this camera here. And as you can see, we do have particle sprites here. So these are particle sprites, and then we have the fog. And this is actually a two component thing that I did here. So let's start with the fog first. So what we can see here is not the standard volumetric fog. Well, I mean, it is, but it is, as you can see, there's, like, some interesting things happening here. So first of all, you can see it looks like the volmetric fog is moving, and then it seems to also have varying density. And the way this was achieved is rather simple but still pretty cool. So here we have a cube. It's the regular editor cube. However, it has collision set to no collision, and it also has all the lighting effects turned off. And what that cube has, it has this material on it here, which is called VM fog volume, volumetric fog volume. And this material is super simple. It is basically our albedo color for the fog. It has walt position coordinates. It has a wind direction, basically. And it uses these three D noise textures. These three D noise textures, you can get them if you turn on the volumetric plug in, this guy here. And everybody has that. So you just turn that one on, and then you go into the engine folder, plugin and you scroll down and somewhere here, Volmetric content. There's a lot pretty useful stuff. We looked at some of it for the sky stuff. But if you go to content, you can get these, like, noises here, and they're really cool for doing, volumetric smoke and fog and all these kind of things, right? So I used these two texts, it's the same texture, but one samples the red channel, one samples the blue channel, and they have different values for, like, contrast and all that. And they basically move throughout the world. I can show you what that looks like if we just do this. And then we go surface and opaque. So this is what this looks like. And you can now see here how we have like this noise that, like, you know, just like pants across. And this is not even that great. Like, usually, I would spend a little bit more time on making this actually in a way where the noise really shifts and changes its form and all that kind of stuff. But so that is basically what I feed into the extinction to make the fog not look as uniform because that's kind of boring. So I use that one I just duplicate it up there, so there's, like, a second one. And that is basically what I did for that one. So there is one problem with that, and that is that the volumetric fog by nature is rather low resolution. So there's not always a lot of detail that you can get with it. And to fix that, I combine it with particle based, well, fog, sort of. And the thing is, so here we have a back, right? So, like, now we got this. And the thing is, in the original scene, we do have these, like, fox sheets here. And I have to tell you I am not a big fan of fox sheets. And the reason for that is because, like, first of all, no matter what you do, like, they cut weird, and you can see them, like, rotate because there's not much volume to them. And then, like, you know, you go through them. And it's kind of like it's not bad. But I think that, like, fox sheets for me is something for, like, super far away to put, like, a cloud into the mountain exactly where I want it or something. So for, like, up close stuff, personally, I don't really use fox sheets much. What I do use, though, is fog particles. So first of all, you could do the one that I'm like, so this is volumetric fog via material applied to, like, a volume, right? And then we have these guys here. And these guys are a Niagara particle system. And you could also make these particles with volumetric material as well. I chose not to because what I actually wanted was here you can see it a bit better. I actually wanted this kind of, like, texture effect that has a lot more resolution that mixes well, like here. They do look bad when you get, like, you know, when you look at them wrong and when you do them wrong, like, they can look bad. But again, I made them super intense over here because it's not an area that we go to, and I just wanted to have the separation. So these add more texture and movement to the volumetric fog, and I can't click them right now, but let me see. So if I go back here, translucent selection. So there you go. And they are just like these super simple, particle systems right here. You can see like I have a fast graphics card, so I didn't really care. I just spawned, like way too many particles. So you can see that stuff here. And it adds this, like, nice dustiness layer here. And it's a lot more like it has more depth to it when you move through it compared to the fog sheets. So this is really simple. Like, this is just like a niagara particle thing. It, like, well, it does spawn it in a different area here, a bunch of settings. And I think the most interesting one is actually just this material, which is no black magic either. So we do have this texture here, which is the smoke tile as diffuse. We have the opacity mask, which is this flip book. And then in the particle itself, I just run the flipbook animation. So it just, like, you know, it wobbles around a bit and it changes a bit. And I think it adds, like, some nice texture to the whole fog in itself. So if I go in here and turn that back on, I think both of these, they just, like, add really well together because you can see if I remove one or the other, it's not going to be that nice. So if I remove these, you can see, like, not too bad, but something is still kind of missing. So add these back in, and now you're like, Yep, this is properly dusty. So proper dusty. So this is nice, and I would always try to use these things together and not in isolation because volumetric effects alone are usually to los and just, like, like old school particle effects, they well, they like the volumetric nature. So you kind of always want to combine these in a smart way. So and looking at this, like I kind of like, really liked this whole thing. And when we go into the camera here again, a very similar angle as to the other one that we had before. But you can also see that the lighting is a bit different on, like, some of the elements. And that is purely like, you know, tweaking the rotation very carefully. So you can see, like, I'm hitting the pillars more because this is something like the pillars are super epic and they kind of get lost here. And what we do see is these pillars, but these pillars kind of don't matter because this stuff is like it's a co star, but this is the main actor here. We want to see that guy. So it is really important that we sort of point the eye towards the parts of interest, right? And I just feel like this works a lot better. So, like, I rotated that while trying to still get the light hit here because I thought that was actually really nice because we can see some of the carvings here on the pillar and, like, all these kind of things. So that is the main thing that has happened here. Now let's look at the post because there's a bunch of interesting things here. Let's just go from top to bottom. Like, of course, I always have my convolution bloom turned on. Exposure, which is fixed it looks the same as before. All good. So there might actually be one thing. Let me quickly check that because maybe I actually used still some fill lights. Yes. So I actually did use. So here's the thing. And I can't see any of this. And they are already you can see, they're like super bright. So I'm just going to add like two more zeros. Bam. Okay. So here, this is really like Again, I said, I usually don't do this, but this is a very staged environment. But the main thing for me is I don't want to use fake lights here in the main area. I really don't like that. So where I'm using the fake lights here is to add a bit of variety in the background for just, you know, having stuff that gets too dark for, like, whatever reason. You know, just like adding a bit of a highlight here. And now that may be too much. So, let's just remove 10. Okay, now it's gone. So, let's add the zero back in. And maybe remove the three and add a one instead. So now we can see, Okay, it still gives us something. It just helps getting some material definition. I think over here to the right, there must be another one. So this is this one. What's this one doing? So, because I need to crank these lights so much now because of the exposure change, right? So, okay. So here you could see it popping. It pops over here on the roof. Just like adds a little bit more from the side comment like some fake skylight a little bit. I just choose white color, nothing fancy here. And I think this one should be over to the right, yep, so we can see that over here. I'm just going to add two zeros. Boom. So now this is way too strong, obviously. Let's take that back, turn it on and off. Like, because, like, you can see how this looks a bit dead. And what I'm doing here, just like I'm actually, like, reviving it, making it look less dead. I'm going to add this one back in, and then again, same thing. Gonna change the three for a one. And now this is still a bit strong. So I'm going to make this a five and get rid of 10. And this, I think, is okay. We don't want to make this too strong because we don't want to have it fight for attention. So again, it's okay to use, like, some fill lights, but it also gets more tricky when you have multiple shots and different things because then you can potentially add something to a shot where it doesn't really belong, and then stuff starts getting weird and so on. But for this one here, I actually decided to just stick with this shot. I didn't do the other shots. I didn't change anything. I just decided like, this is the one. So let's go back to the post volume here. Then, of course, I added a little bit of chromatic aberration. I did not choose the dirt mask. I did not do anything here. However, I did use the local exposure. And this thing is interesting. So what this is maybe some of you know it. So like, usually exposure is a global thing, right? So, if I lift the exposure, it will make the shadows brighter, but it will also, like, make the highlights brighter. It will start blowing out things. It's very natural. But that is not something that, for example, the old masters did when they were painting. When they were painting, they were painting things more in a way that the human eye sees things. And the human eye has a hugely different perception of light intensities than a camera sensor does. So our eyes don't clip the same way as a camera, basically. And what a lot of photographers do is when they take pictures, is they expose their pictures for the highlights to look nice, which means that the dark parts, they actually turn out to be too dark. And then what they do is in Photoshop light room, you have the slider, which is called shadows. And when you slide that, it starts lifting the shadows, but what it is actually doing in the background, and that is really fascinating, I think. Where is my snipping? There it is. So what it actually does is, so, basically, like, how does it know where the shadows are and stuff? So it basically analyzes the image, it looks for the dark values. And I'm going to ignore the background now, okay? Because I don't want to do this, like, super detailed painting with my mouse here. But what it basically does, it looks in the picture for, like, light values, mid values, and dark values. And then it creates a mask like this. And then when you say shadows plus ten, it applies basically a brighter exposure here, but it masks it. So all this in the center, it stays the same, and the only thing that is affected by the exposure change is this stuff here. And like photographers love that they use it all the time. I use it all the time. And it's really nice because again, you expose for the highlight, and then you lift the shadows because you take pictures and raw, so you have a lot of data still available. So it's not like that you're just introducing bad quality by raising this. No, you have the data. And same goes for the renderer. You have that data, too. And if you look at this here, you can see that when I do that, that the bright values of the scene are not getting altered. They do get altered a little bit, and that is because I was messing down here with the middle gray bias. But, basically what you can do here is you can lift the shadows and you can make it, so the rest of the image is not as touched by it, and it's the same thing, and it actually creates a dynamic mask. So when you do this too strong, you can actually see haloing from it. And this is a rather new feature. I actually don't remember when it came into the engine, but has been highly requested. I think the first video game that used a feature like that was the first well, I mean, God of War four. So God of War 2018 the first one of the nodicGd of war games, they used localized exposure to tame dark spots. So this is how it should look originally. Without any tweaks, this one doesn't do anything until I touch this. And then I just brought this down a notch to give it a little bit more of a feel. And I really like that subtle effect. Again, you should not do it too much because you will destroy the relationship of exposure, right? Now, you ask me, like, why do you not do it via exposure or making the sky brighter? Is because then the sky would blow out more, I would lose more of the blue, and I did like the blue. So everything I did here is a conscious choice of, like, This is the look that I want because I am mimicking a little bit more how you would see it with your eye or how a master, an old master would paint it potentially. And not necessarily how the camera lens sees it. We do have some chromatic aberration, though, but that is really just very, very, very subtle, almost not noticeable. And I actually did not use film grain. Like, people that know me, they know, like, like, I think grain is not a choice. It's an obligation. But let's put that aside. But like, grain is super awesome and super important, but it is only needed where it is needed, and here it is not. And now you see me, the man that puts grain on everything, not using grain because I think this serves the subject way better. Before we move forward, I did do something really stupid, though, that kind of makes no sense if you think about what I just said, I added lens distortion. So you can see that this thing here is actually a tiny little bit round. So you can see here. I'm actually adding, this would be the perfect thing here. Like, now it's perfectly fine as default. And then I add this lens distortion. And now you're saying, like, Dude, did you not just say you went with, like, a look like the eye has? And I'm like, Yes, I did go with the look of what the eye sees. But let's be honest, our eyesight is distorted, too. So I was just like, I just really like that, right? It doesn't make any sense, but I really like it, and here is the most important thing. It doesn't break it in a way that is in your face. I think that is really important for people to understand because sometimes they think like, Yeah, but you just made a completely random choice, and I'm like, No, I did not make a random choice. I made a very deliberate choice. Yeah, but it goes against