Unreal Engine 5 - Lighting for Beginners & Cinematics!

1. Introduction: . 2. Downloading Unreal Engine 5: Okay first things first, let's start by downloading Unreal Engine 5. Type Unreal Engine in the Google search bar or simply just go to UnrealEngine.com. On the homepage you will see a download icon in the top right corner, click it to proceed. To get started you need to download the Epic Games Launcher and the download should start automatically, um it may take a while to load. Next just install the Launcher and follow all the instruction. As you can see I already have the Launcher installed so I move on to the next step. On the left side select Unreal Engine, then in the top right corner you'll be able to choose the version you want to install. As you can see I have version 5. 4 that already install, you can also select the library icon where you will see the option to download different version of the engine. You can choose any version depending on your preferences, but for the purposes of this Course we need the latest version. 3. Create UE5 Project: Welcome back, we're going to create Project. Select Launch icon in the top right corner, it will open Epic Launcher for your project, then go to the games and we're going to use the Blank project. On the right side you will see Blueprint and C++ option, we want to select Blueprint and as well be sure you have Started Content selected. In Project Location we can select the destination of our project and obviously you have to name your project. I'm going to name it UE5 Lightning Course. Once you're ready just click create, it will take a while to create your project and you supposed to see the open level, something like this, also some information tab may appear, for example like this one for quixel and Fab. You can open Content Drawer or Content Browser to see the folders. So we have Starter Content and Developers, next things we need to do is to go to the Edit tab, select project settings, type Lumen and check Dynamic Global Illumination and Reflection method. We need to have Lumen selected then type "ray" for Ray Tracing okay, we need to select Support Hardware Ray Tracing and Use Hardware Ray Tracing when available, it depends what kind of the GPU you have. That's all so next things you need to do is just restart your project after you restart it it will be ready to work we need to save it and I see you in the next Lecture. 4. Downlaod FAB assets: Hi. Welcome back. In this lecture, I want to show you how to add assets to our project. First, go to a piaunger select fab in the top left corner. Then you will see option to start exploring once selected, you will see the new window in your Internet browser. It's Fab Library. Then go to Discover and select Unreal Engine. Now type vehicle variety. Go to add this free, really good quality pack to our project. Select the first one once you click, you will see two options. I already added this pack to my library, so I will see option view in launcher or view in my library. I'm going to select the first one. It will open the Epic launcher. Now I need to refresh the FIB library and search for our asset. So just type vehicle. And you will see option add to the project. Once you select it, you will see all your project. There is a small window on the top. Show all project. You can select lick because sometimes your project may not be visible. Then all you need to do is just select your project. Sometimes happen that the assets will be outdated, so you also need to select the latest version of the project which is actually updated to. Then add to the project, it will start process of downloading your assets and adding it to your project. Then go back to the fab and type SALT. And we are going to repeat the whole process again. I'm going to select this asset. It is already in my library, so I will select view in epic launcher and I will search for it again. You will see option at to your project. Actually, in our project, we use the model of the plane, which is a 15. However, after the newest Fab update, this model is no longer available, but I urge you to use any high quality free D assets. And I'm going to show you how to add our abandoned apartment. This is different type of the project. So once you click it, it will ask you to create a new project. So you need to name it. You need to select the folder destination for your project. And once you are ready, just click Create and it will create a new project. Unless you downloaded the full project from our Google Drive, then you can just move to the next step. You will see UE five name of our project and you have to double click. Then you will see Windows select the NRL engine version for this project. Obviously, you're going to select the latest version of your NRL which you install. Once project is open, you might see the window which will have the information missing project settings. You have two options. You can open project settings or you can directly click the link below. In that case, we need to add SM six, which you can find in the platforms Windows. So this is settings for Windows target platform. Just check this box. And real Engine ask you to restart. But before we do it, I want to also check other features. So let's type Lumen and select use hardware rate racing when available. Also high quality translucency reflections and type array for rate racing. Okay, support hardware is already selected as well. You can see we have puffed racing already selected for this specific project. It's fine because we are going to use puffed racing later in this project. Now you can restart your project. It will take some time because you need to compile shaders, prepare texture, also prepare static meshes and all the mesh cards. So these are the most important options for this project. Once you're ready, you can save on progress and I see you in the next lecture. 5. UE5 navigation, hotkeys and fundamentals: In this lesson I'll show you how to navigate the Unreal Engine 5. If you already familiar with the controls feel free to skip the basics and jump to the more advanced functions. To move the camera or rotate the view hold down the right mouse button and move it in any direction, if you hold down both the right and left mouse buttons moving the mouse forward - we move the camera up, moving it backwards will lower and moving it left and right will allow you to navigate around the level, as well if you press the left mouse button and move your mouse you can move the camera freely. You can also change the camera speed, click in the upper right corner and select the desired speed, however most often you'd use the keyboard and mouse to move. Hold down the right mouse button pess W to move forward, S to move backward, A to move left and D to move right, just like in games. Press E to move camera up and Q to move it down, additionally while holding down the right mouse button you can use the Z key to zoom out or the C key to zoom in. To return to the starting position release the right mouse button. You can also use the mouse scroll to zoom in and out, these are the basic functions for controlling your view, just try to play with it and test it. Okay, now let's move on to some more important program functions, clicking on the file we'll show you options for creating a new level, saving the lever saving your progress, which is important and very good practice. There's also an option to import assets into the project or export the assets from your project. The edit windows contains the frequently used shortcuts, CNTR + Z for undoing action, It also has functions related to objects and projects elements like cut, copy, paste, duplicate or delete. The window tab is essential for creating a workspace, for example the Place Actors window can be activated here. I'll show you in a second, but let's start with the content browser. In the bottom left corner, this is your primary workspace it contains all the folders in the project giving you direct access to all of them. You should see every set of assets we just downloaded you can scroll down, open them Okay to change the icon size click settings on the right side and choose the icon size, you can also pin the content browser permanently. To do this just click Windows again and select Content Browser... Content Browser 1, now you'll have it pin. Similarly you can open and pin the Place Actors window, this will allow you to choose many useful elements such as shapes for blocking. In the cinematics tab you also find um systems like Camara rig crane or camara rig rail, which we'll use in this Course. You can see them there. Okay, in the Visual Effects tab you'll find post Process Volume which I will discuss in detail later in the Course and teach you how to use quickly & effectively Spare Reflection Capture, Sky Atmosphere or Exponential High Fog all will be covered in the Lighting Chapter, but you;ll see how easily you can dramatically change the atmosphere of your scenes. Another important elements is the Outliner window, it contains all the elements used in the given level, every actor used in the level would be automatically visible in the Outliner Window. For example let's choose a basic cube, click and hold the left mouse button, drag the element onto the level area and release the button. The element will be added to your level and will automatically appear in the Outliner. You can also control the visibility as you see of this object by clicking the eye icon, this is very useful when you have elements that consume a lot of GPU power, you can temporarily disable the visibility. Now let's learn how to control this actor we already know how to change the view so let's start with Translate Object used to move the object in the X U and Z planes we also have the rotate and scale option. Click and hold the left mouse button, the selected arrow indicating and specific plane they move the mouse to move your object. We also have snapping function for very precise translation, as you can see it is enabled, let's change the scale and test how it works in practice. Distance in Unreal Engine is measured in meters giving you very realistic and accurate scale. Okay the next option is object rotation we control the change in position exactly the same way as with translation, tests shows different planes, the last function is scaling the object, you can scale as much as you want just test it. Alright to reset you can use the small arrow in details window which contains all the necessary information about the given actor you see the transfer tab you can also control the object's position in your lever here for example let's change scale to 4, if the lock is checked all values will be scaled automatically, then the rest set okay and we have also two option for controlling the actor's position in the project: Gizmo Local and Gizmo World. Why is this useful? Let's say I change the oject rotation and select the Gizmo Local option I will be able to move our mesh according to objects axis, choosing the World option the world will be relative to our object, test how it works yourself, okay to wrap up let's look at how to control actor using the keyboard press CNTR and then hold down the left mouse button now you can move the object along the X axis the right mouse button for the U axis and both mouse button for the Z axis. Now let's see what happen when you reset our object position 0 position, as you can see our object has disappeared... however you can easily find that, select cube in the outliner hover over the level and press the F key, you'll be automatically transported to your actor and just to delete the cube press the backspace. Okay let's move on to the next UE5 features, click the icon in the upper left corner, on the workspace which will open Viewport options, here you will find options such as turn in Realtime on - off, shortcut CNTR + R, as well show FPS. Field of View and see how it affects your current view. Another option is Screen Percentage, if you have powerful graphic card you can comfortably work at hundred percent. Okay next explore the View Settings, the standard is perspective which is most commonly used, check out the other option and test them yourself now. Okay another useful functionality is the various scene View Options. Lit shows the scene in your normal light, Unlit without light, useful for heavy project. Okay as you can see the next one is wireframe - probably needs no explanation and personally I like to use as well Detail Lighting as it allows us to check and work on the lightning in our scenes. for example I'm going to use two shapes, see how in this view you can control the light. We basically covered all the basic function that you'll see in this course, of course in the following chapters I will gradually introduce new interesting information that will definitely be useful to you the future, many of these are tips and tricks based on experience which should help save you many hours of work and searching for information in tutorials or forums. Now we begin the best part it should be not only work but also great fun, as it is a creative process, and there is no wrong or incorrect effect here, everything is subjective and as long as you adhere to the basic principles the rest is just a matter of your taste. Okay let's see you in the next lesson. 6. Create Custom Lighting System: Welcome back in the next chapter, let's open your first project we created I called it UE5 Lighting Course, you will see the open world map again but I want to change that map to our Salt Flats Assets map so open the folder go to the maps you will see free maps and select the last one, Salt Flats P. Double click to open the map and now to make a default map we need to go to the edit window and select project settings, go to Map & Modes and you will see editor startup map, select our map and repeat the process with game default map. Anytime you open your project that will be the map which is going to load. Now just to be sure type Lumen to check our Lumen and Ray Tracing settings in the project, it looks correct, okay now just type Ray, okay everything is fine, we are good to go. I wanted you to download this specific environment because first of all you will see some kind of the sphere references with the material which we can use later as well we have all the basic actors in the level. Before we start we need to add also reference mash to our project in that case is going to be our fighter F15 mesh, so go to the Vigilante content, select vehicles - West Fighter and we are not going to use Blue Print, we can use skeletal mesh, you can drag and drop into the level, but before you drag and drop maybe we can activate the snapping. Go to the cycles, then transform... okay select surface snapping and now we can add our mesh to the scene. It will be automatically also added to Outliner. There is no bad or good settings, it's up to you, up to your vision, try different settings to find the best ones for your project. One more thing we need to change open the Show tab and just deactivate the Grid. So this particular lever is great for the lighting reference because, as you noticed, the landscape is almost completely flat and the surface is white. It will be perfect as the reference for our lighting actors okay, so here we have the structure of our project in Outliner, for example you can disable the visibility of any actor you want like in this case the Volumetric Cloud and in this folder also you have other Lighting Actors, so I want to select all of them except the Volometic Cloud and just delete. Because I want to create the lighting from the scratch I want to show you how to create the lighting from very, very beginning So the only one source of the lighting right now, it looks like the emissive lightning from our mesh material. So to add our lighting go to the Place Actor and first type sky. We need to add two actors: Sky Light and Sky Atmosphere. still nothing happened, okay next one is going to be Directional Light, which actually imitates the real sun in our shot, so once you drag and drop now you will see something changed. Another one is the Exponential Height Fog, drag and drop into our scene and the last one is going to be Post Process Volume, you will notice the kind of the field when you add the Post Process, we need to expand it. I'm going to show you how to do it in a moment but first let's go to the World Setting tab and in the search bar type "force". You will see option - Force No Precomputed Lightning, it supposed to be selected if it's not be sure it's true. Okay, it basically resets Lighting in our level. Next go to the Outliner and just to keep the correct name convention I like to select all the lighting actors and just drag and drop them into our Scene Atmosphere folder, where we have our Volumetric Clouds. Next select the Post Process Volume and type "infinite", because we want to change behaviour of Post Process - Infinite Extent (Unbound). Once selected our project is ready to go and I see you in the next Lecture. 7. Sky Light: Welcome back in this Lecture I want to show you how to add assets to our project, first go to Epic Launcher select FAB in the top left corner then you will see option to start exploring once selected you will see the new window in your internet browser its FAB library. Then go to discover and select Unreal Engine now type vehicle variety, I'm going to add this free, really good quality pack to our project select the first one once you click you will see two options I already added this pack to my library so I will see option view in launcher or view in my library I'm going to select the first one it will open the epic launcher now I need to refresh the FAB library and search for our asset so just type vehicle and you will see option add to the project once you select that you will see all your project there is a small window on the top show all project you can select it because sometimes your project may not be visible then all you need to do is just select your project sometimes happen that the assets will be outdated so you also need to select the latest version of the project which is actually updated to then add to the project it will start process of downloading your assets and adding it to your project then go back to the FAB and type salt and we are going to repeat the whole process again I'm going to select this asset it is already in my library so I will select view in Epic Launcher and I will search for it again and you will see option add to your project actually in our project we use the model of the plane which is F15 however after the newest update this model is no longer available but I urge you to use any high quality 3D assets and I'm going to show you how to add our Abandoned Apartment this is different type of the project so once you click it it will ask you to create the new project so you need to name it you need to select the folder destination for your project and once you are ready just click create and it will create the new project. Unless you downloaded the full project from our Google Drive then you can just move to the next step you will see UE5 name of our project and you have to double click then you will see window, select the Unreal Engine version for this project obviously you're going to select the latest version of your Unreal which you installed. Once project is open you may see the window which will have the information: Missing Project Settings. You have two options you can open Project Settings or you can directly click the link below in that case we need to add SM6 which you can find in the Platforms - Windows. So this is setting for Windows target platform just check this box and Unreal Engine will ask you to restart but before we do it I want to also check other features so let's type Lumen and select use Hardware Ray Tracing when available also High Quality Translucency Reflections and type ray for Ray Tracing. Okay Support Hardware is already selected as well you can see we have Path Tracing already selected, for this specific project it's fine... because we are going to use Path Tracing later in this project. Now you can restart your project it will take some time because it needs to compiles shaders, prepare texture, also prepare static meshes and all the mesh cards. So these are the most important options for this project once you're ready you can save your progress and I'll see you in the next Lecture. 8. Master Sequence & Sky Atmosphere: Welcome back, in this Lecture I want to show you how to work with Sky Atmosphere, but before we start I want to create the cinematic sequence. Okay so right click in the content folder, create the new folder, let's call it cinematics and now just create the Master Sequence. If you don't know how to do it we have another Unreal Engine 5 Course dedicated directly to cinematics in Unreal Engine 5. Let's create 2 sequences. 5 second duration should be find and just create them, okay. I like to go with that kind of the approach because we can always keyframe any changes in our lighting actor inside the sequencer so we don't have to create the new sublevel for a lighting, but we can control all the settings and all the feature directly inside the sequencer. So let's set up simple scene to have better reference of our actor, it looks very nice, okay as you can see I disabled the visibility of our clouds and our Exponential Height Fog, just to focus on the Sky Atmosphere actor. Okay we need to set up also the focus, it looks fine save and we are good to go. Okay, now we can select our Sky Atmosphere. What is a Sky Atmosphere? Simulating the Sky Atmosphere requires several properties that mimic the look and feel of a real world atmosphere, by default the Sky Atmosphere components represent earth. And again we have very similar features first one is the mobility so as a random it should be as movable, I'd like to keep that settings on, then we can change the transform mode, but the standard one, Planet Top at Absolute World Origin is absolutely enough. Next one is the Ground Radius, try different settings to find the best ones for your project you can see the difference once we decrease the value of it. Next one is the Ground Albedo, as you can see we can control the color of our background, but it doesn't affect our mesh. Another important feature is Rayleight and obviously the Atmosphere Height and we have also the option for Multi Scattering, but to see the Multi Scattering changes we need to make our Exponential Height Fog visible for a moment, so you can notice a difference. Okay let's try 50 and now... okay I think it's very very easy to notice the difference right now. Okay, let's turn off the visibility of the fog again and go to the Rayleight so here we have basically three main option the first one is the scattering scale again if we are going to have the Exponential Height Fog visible it will be much, much easier to notice the difference. We have the scattering color as well and the Rayleight affects our mesh itself as well. Try different values. Another one is atmosphere Mie, here we have the... again scattering scale, as you can see it directly affects the intensity of the fog in our shot and we can as well control the color, so there is a lot of different features which can help you create a very unique Sky Atmosphere in your shot or your game. Another one is absorption scale and obviously we have the exponential distribution and as well we have the anisotropy option. Let's go back to the random settings, so here the value closer to 1 basically means the light is more scattering forward. I'd like to keep it at random. Another one is the absorption scale and also we can change the absorption color itself, it's a good idea to try different settings and go from the low to very high values and in Art Direction also we have the Sky Luminance Factor which is very interesting feature okay once we change it then you can control Aerial Perspective View distant scale and again we can control fog here directly in that Art Direction tap, you can see the difference especially in the background of our shot. okay these are the most important features for our Sky Atmosphere I see you in the next lesson. 9. Directional Light: Welcome back, in this Lecture I want to show you how to work with probably the most important lighting actor which is Directional Light. So we have the Volumetric Clouds and Exponential Height Fog visibility on let's start with the mobility, change it to Movable because we want to control position of our actor, then drag and drop our actor inside the sequencer and click the plus icon. in the Directional Light and the Transform tab. Okay, now you can keyframe it to save the position of our actor in the shot, just like before I want to show you how to use it inside the sequencer so in future you can as well use it in your cinematics. Okay so we have two ways to control the position of Directional Light: first one we can control it directly inside the rotation tab, so if you change the y axis it will affect the height of our sun which is Directional Light in that case as you will notice the X axis, basically doesn't affect the position of Directional Light, so we can use the Z axis to change the rotation around our landscape. Try find... to find the best place for our Directional Light and just keyframe its position, it looks really nice, also you can press S on your keyboard to keyframe the position of the Directional Light, once the transform tab is highlighted. Now reset the rotation and I show you the second way to control our Directional Light. If you press and hold CTRL & L on your keyboard by moving your mouse you will change the position of your sun in your scene. It is very intuitive and really great way to control our lighting in the shots. Again try to find the best angle and keyframe the position of Directional Light. Okay, once ready go to the features - first one obviously is intensity, second one we can control the albedo color of our light. I keep it random then we have the Source Angle it indicates the size of light source in this case our sun, so lower value - we have sharper shadows, larger angle will produce softer and more diffused shadows. In that case I think I go for 2.3, should be fine yes it looks really good as well you can control the Source Soft Angle. Next one we have the Temperature it will affect our level so we can go with warmer or colder approach, okay let's keep it random, then we have Cast Shadows, we can disable shadows completely and Affects World obviously will turn off our actor. Then we have Indirect Lighting Intensity, this parameter determines the contribution of indirect lighting intensity basically light which bounces from other objects. I think 1.5 should be fine and let's increase the intensity. Okay, another perimeter is Volumetric Gathering Intensity Scattering determines how light will affect the fog and particles in your scene, however I'm going to explain it in detail in next lesson. Okay let's go to another important feature which is Light Sharp Bloom. In Unreal Engine we have 3 main way to control the Bloom first one is Post Process second Camera and the third one is Directional Lighting, so right now I'm going to quickly frame it in our Sequencer to show you the difference. So at frame 30 we will not have Light Shaft Bloom and at frame 35 we're going to turn it on and we can control Bloom Max Brightness to create much more realistic and the really nice scene, again I'm going to keyframe it to see a difference between both settings. I think it will looks really nice as well we can change the Bloom Tint, so let's try it now as you can see this very, very minimal tweaks changed drastically how our scene looks. Okay let's try that kind of the color in the Lightning and decrease the Bloom Max Brightness to 2 and keyframe. It looks very interesting right now, you can easily see the difference, okay another settings is Distance Field Shadows which is going to be very useful for optimizing your game then we also have the Ray Tracing option, of course more samples per pixel will increase the cost of your GPU and we go to the Atmosphere and Cloud option. The first one we have Atmosphere Sunlight, we can also select option to Cast Shadows on Clouds, Cast Shadows on Atmosphere and the last one Cast Cloud Shadows. because in that scene we don't have too much clouds as well we have only one mesh and our landscape is completely flat it will be hard to see the difference, you can barely see it in the background. Try different settings to find the best ones for your project, always try to experiment. Okay now search for the Ray Tracing, there is one more settings we need to change, Cast Rate Traced Shadows. I want to set it to enabled, okay these are the most important features of this actor. At the end of this Lecture I have a quick challenge for you. I would like you to creating two different setups for the Directional Light: the first one should imitate a sunny midday and the second one should be a sunset, if possible save them in a Sequencer using keyframes, do not change the Camera, focus only on the Directional Light. Good luck and see you in the next Lecture! 10. Volumetric Clouds: Welcome back, in this Lecture I want to focus on Volumetric Clouds, it's very important feature however in Unreal Engine we don't have too much possibilities to control that kind of the actor. So first one we have the Layer Bottom Altitude, second option we can control the Height of our Volumetric Clouds as well we can control the Tracing Start Max Distance and the Tracing Start Distance. Okay most of the control we can get inside the material so if you scroll down you will see the cloud material when you press the magnifying glass you will be taken to the folder with this material by double click you will open this Material. This is not the main Parent Material, this is actually the Material Instance and here you will see a lot of different parameters, which will control behaviour or the our Volumetric Clouds in the scene. Try different settings to find the best ones, okay once saved I want to show you another option inside the Unreal Engine, first go to settings and be sure you have Show Engine Content and Show Plugin Content selected, then go to the edit and plugins search for Volumemetrics. I already added this pack to my project so I don't have to restart my UE5 project, once it's downloaded you will have to go to the engine and inside the plugins folder scroll down to the V and you supposed to see Volumetrics Content. Double click to open - you will have tools also you will have the content and inside the content folder you will have the sky folder double click and here you will find the materials and for this particular example I want to use only the Material Instance, most of these materials are for Manual Cloud Painting, but this is not part of this Course, this is much more advanced feature, so let's try to search for one of them. try 01 or maybe we can type instance, so we can see only the instance materials. Okay, I think that one should be fine morning 1 paint clouds, okay let's just press the arrow and it will add the material to your volumetric clouds actor. As you can see the clouds are badly visible, in Unreal Engine 5 you need to tweak the parameters of this materials from Volometric Pack to even see the clouds appearing, so open the Material Instance and try to find the Detail parameter I think it should be in the flow map. Okay here we go try to increase it maybe 2 as you can see now our clouds are visible in our shot. You have few materials to try, again try to experiment there is no bad or good settings everything is pretty much okay it all depends of your expectation and of your project. As well you can try to control the animation of the clouds I think it's here in the Storm Fake Adverction, yes that's correct, so I'm going to try some little settings and I have quick challenge for you right now. Okay I want you to select Material Instance, play with the parameters, save your settings and basically create your own clouds in your level, as you can see it looks completely different, so Volumetric Clouds are very, very important for the final shot. We have also two more features I wanted to show you, you can control the behaviour or the clouds both in Directional Light, if you scroll down you will see the Atmosphere and Cloud, we mentioned that part before in previous Lecture, okay as well you can control the behaviour of your Volumetric Clouds inside the Sky Light. In Directional Light also you have more options here and in Sky Light you can play basically with the ambient occlusion so again try different settings to find the best ones for your project there is no good or no bad option. Okay, see you in the next Lecture. 11. Exponential Height Fog: Hello in this Lecture I want to focus on very important part of our level, but first let's just duplicate our object, you can do it by press and hold Alt key, press left mouse key over the transform arrow and just move it into the level. I want to have another mesh maybe like 10, 20 meters behind our main one so we can clearly see the behaviour of Exponential Height Fog. Okay let's start with the features, so first one we have the Exponential Height Fog Component and also we have Second Fog data but we'll focus on it later. So first feature is the Fog Density, there is not much to explain but you have to try different approaches, if you go very high like one you will see we have very very foggy scene we can control behaviour also by the Fog Height Falloff. Okay, we have also fog Inscatrering Color which gives you possibility to create much different atmosphere in your shot. It can be also keyframed inside the Sequencer, okay we can also control the Sky Atmosphere, Ambient Contribution then we have Fog Max Opacity which controls both Fogs, the second Fog data and the first Fog data. Then we have Start Distance for our fog and the Fog Cutoff Distance, but the most important part, if you want the realistic shot, you need to scroll down to the Volumetric Fog and make it enabled. Okay, you will instantly notice huge difference in your shot, so right now we can control as well the color of our Volumetric Fog, Scattering Distribution, Extinction Scale, as well the View Distance for our Volumetric Fog. Again try different settings try to experiment. And then we have also the Start Distance, right now is 0 so basically fog starts right in front of us, if you're going to increase it you will see different visual effect, okay. And we can control it also by Near Fade in Distance. The last option is the Static Lighting Scattering Intensity, however I'm going to explain it in the next chapter. Okay let's go to the next setting which is Directional Inscattering, it will be visible once you will have the sun, Directional Light in that case, in our scene, once I will change the color you will see the huge difference so we can control the value of the component as well we can control the start distance and the color. Okay try to play with different values, find the best one. I'm going to keep it random. Okay now let's focus on the Second Fog Data. I want to show you how it will affect our shot so let's just increase it to 2, maybe try 1 it's still too much it's completely foggy okay well we try 0.2 we'll see huge difference you need to play around with different features, okay another one is the Fog Height Offset, you can clearly see the difference right now in the shot, so I wanted to try different approach and create really, really interesting Exponential Height Fog atmosphere for your shot. These are the most important features of this actor and I have the quick challenge for you. Select volometric fog play with the perimeters create perfect height fog settings for your shot and save your scene. See you in the next lecture. 12. Post Process Volume: Welcome back in this chapter I want to focus on Post Process first, select settings collapse all categories and we're going one by one okay, first one let's open Lens here you will have Bloom and Exposure. I'm going to start with Exposure, at random it's going to be set up at automatic and you can control the settings by minimum and maximum EV however I prefer to go with the manual option first you need to disable Absolute Physical Camera and then change Metering Mode to Manual, okay next one we have a Bloom standard method it's not the best option especially for cinematics I prefer to go with Convolution and with the Bloom you have to be very careful because the way you see it in the viewport is not exactly the same way it's going to be rendered. So I prefer to decrease the value usually something around 0.1, maybe 0.2 but you have to test it. Another one we have the advance option and here you can also control other settings if you go with the automatic exposure okay. Next one is the Chromatic Aberration, this is the standard realistic effect in photography. I'm going to show you how it looks with the higher value, just focus on the mesh in the first in the first place okay you will see the difference I like to keep it very subtle something like 0.2, then we can also add the Dirt Mask and we have camera standard option like ISO value, shutter speed, aperture, however we can control it inside the Camera. Next we have the Local Exposure so we can control the Highlight Contrast usually you supposed to go between 0.6 to 1 also the Shadow Contrast, and again if you take a look you can basically keyframe each of this particular feature inside your scene. Okay let's go back to the random, another one is the Middle Grey Bias also you can change the Highlight Threshold, and Shadow Threshold however I prefer to keep this two at random value I like to play a little bit with the Middle Grey Bias. Okay, another one is Lens Flares. I'm going to change the Viewport, okay so now you can clearly see the Lens Flares, we can change the color of it, we can change the intensity, also we can control a size/ Again try different approach. I like to keep intensity of Lens Flares somewhere between 0.25 to 0.5 to have this very realistic feeling. Next one is the Vignette Intensity, it depends of your concept art however I don't like to go over 0.4. Another one is Depth of Field, if you cannot create enough DOF via your camera settings you can always try Depth Blur Kilometers for 50% and Depth Blur Radius. Use as a two settings which can basically control the behaviour of depth of the field in your shot. I'm going to show you it quickly right now, please focus on the background and you will see instantly the difference in the focus okay I think it's clearly visible especially if you look at the mountains. Right now they are completely blurred. okay, next one I want to show you the film option so the most important probably is the Slope, Toe and the Shoulder, again there is no bad, wrong or good settings all depends of your concept art ideas. Then we can go to Global Illumination and obviously we have to check the Lumen but because we did it before it already supposed to be selected then you can also control the quality of the Lumen scene keep in mind it will be higher cost for your graphic cards however if we going for cinematics before rendering your shot I strongly recommend to look at the settings. The same we have here, if we open the advance window we can change the Final Final Gathering Lighting. Okay and then we can go to the Reflections and select the Lumen and you can again change the quality, so please keep in mind the random it usually will be at 1 to keep the performance because Unreal Engine mostly is the software created for video games but if you want to create cinematics you need to go into the Post Process and check all these settings. Okay let's take a look at the Film Grain so you basically can create the more natural film grain effect. I'm going to crease it so you can see the difference, I think it's visible, the best idea is to test most of these features one by one. Okay another one very interesting and let's say important is obviously the color grading, so you can control it directly inside the Unreal Engine or you can control it in some kind of the post production software like Da Vinci Resolve for example. To do it you have to go to miscelaneous and change first 3 settings: Blue Correction, Expand Gamut, Tone Curve Amount, if you decrease them to zero, it will be perfect settings for your color correction later on in the post production software. Okay and see you in the next Lecture. 13. Chapter Summary: Welcome back in the last Lecture of this chapter, now I want you to play around with all the Lighting actors we created/ I'm going to play little sequence I created. Okay I don't want you to duplicate my shots I want you to create your own individual project. however I'm going to ask you to try to use different actors like Directional Light, Exponential Height Fog, Sky Atmosphere, also some kind of the Post Process settings inside the Sequencer and try to keyframe them and change their behaviour. For example try to change the position of the sun in your shot like you see in my scene number one, try to play around with the Height Fog as well values the Sky Light, maybe the Sky Atmosphere colors. Okay and there is one more thing I wanted to show you, we have also in the Viewport option to see lightning only as well detail lightning, it is a very good way to check your Lighting actor's behaviour before you start rendering your shot. As you can see in the Detail Lighting View mode you can also see all the reflections in the area. Okay now I have a quick challenge for you, I want you to prepare all lighting actors, find the best camera angles, check your lighting settings in detailed lighting view and finally capture your scene, either as a screenshot or as a rendering sequence. Okay, see you in the next Lesson! 14. HDRI Backdrop: Welcome back, before we start let's organise our Outliner, click on the settings option, then collapse all folders to have really clean a really nice organised workspace. Then go to the map folder right click and create the new level, you're going to create completely empty level. Once you select and you name it let's just call it HDRI, you have to save it, okay so we have to save it. Then double click to open it and you will see completely empty level, no light no meshes, no object in our level and I want to show you how to create HDRI maps so go to the plugins search for HDR, then select Backdrop, restart your engine. Again, go to the map folder, double click our new level and now go to the Place Actor window and search for HDRI. Drag and drop our HDRI Backdrop, instantly you will see photorealistic environment in your shot, this is great for project visualization the key benefits of using HDR image as a backdrop of product visualization is that it's relatively quick to set up. We can control the size we can control the position, okay and I already downloaded 2 maps, so you can use for example page like polyhaven to get the free HDRI map or you can buy some really nice maps from internet stores, like FAB. Now I'm going to create a new folder, okay and I'm going to grag and drop our new maps into our project. It will take some time, once import is ready we can change our map inside the HDRI Backdrop. This one looks really good, as you can see it is very fast method to achieve really nice background environment for your scene, if you want to make kind of the screenshot it's perfect, however it's not great idea to use it in the games or professional 3D cinematics. One more thing I want to create in this lecture. I want to create the reference for you remember from the last chapter in our first environment we had few spheres which were reference for our lighting. So let's create simple sphere, change the scale to 0.5 and duplicate it 4 times, okay great. Now I'm going to create material if you're not familiar with materials it will be great exercise for you. so let's create new folder let's call it materials sphere, double click, right click in the folder and select Material. First I'm going to create the Master Material, so let's call it M_ Sphere_Master, double click and you will see new window. Okay now if you press and hold "S" plus+ you click left mouse, you will create the Scalar Parameter. Let's call the first one Albedo and we can obviously copy it by clicking CTRL + C and paste it by clicking CTRL + V. Once you create the Scalar Parameter you have to connect it with specific part of your Material so first one Albedo is going to be be connected with Base Color, second one which we named Metallic is going to be connected with Metallic and the last one is going to be Roughness. Okay, once created save your Material and now we are going to create Material Instances, based on our Master Material, so you don't have to create four different Master Materials, we can simply change the values inside our Material Instances, so let's call this one we start with the Black Sphere. Double click and before let just attach to our sphere okay click the arrow okay now double click our Material and you will see Albedo, Metallic, Roughness inside Global Color Parameter Values, so first we going to change to 0.05 Metallic is going to be 0 and the Roughness is going to be 0.3. In the real world there is never value like 0 or 1, because every object absorbs some part of the light, in that specific situation we're going to create scenario later with Diirectional Light, which is going to imitate the sun. Okay, second one is going to be... it's going to be white, so we go with 0.85, the completely white snow is actually 0.9, the same Roughness 0.3, now we going to create the grey one so Albedo 0.18, Metallness 0 and Roughness as well 0.3. And the last one is going to be chrome material, just again duplicate our Material Instance, name it Chrome and for the Chrome Material we need 0.9 Albedo, 1.0 for Metalness and for the Roughness between 0.05 to 0.02. Okay, great save your progress and now we need to attach our Material Instances to our spheres so just like before select your Material click the arrow for each particular sphere. Okay now we have all our Materials you can clearly see the reflection of our HDRI map and as well you can control the intensity for the HDRI Backdrop, as well the size and projection center. Try different settings, Okay one more thing before we move to the next Lecture. I want to create Blueprint based on all these 4 spheres, so select all of them go to the window Blueprint Class, Convert Selection to Blueprint Class Okay name your Blueprint, now select the destination and once you accept your Blueprint is going to be created, so now it will be much easier for you to control this kind of the reference spheres, all four spheres will be inside one blueprint, so we don't have to move them one by one 15. Create Custom Lighting System: Welcome back in another Lecture, I want to open our apartment level, go to the Map you will see Apartment here, just quick reminder go to the Project Settings, Map & Modes, just to be sure that your main apartment level is select as a default. Okay now I want to set up our scene, first thing probably you may notice that kind of really ugly Preview writing in your level, how to disable? You have to go to the options Show, go to the Visualize and you will see preview shadow indicator, once you turn off it's supposed to disappear, however if you want to hide all the navigation icons and you press G it may happen, it will appear again, so basically you have to repeat the process again. Go to the Visualize and turn off the preview. I want to create our lighting basically from scratch so as you can see it looks really good, this is default project setup, but we need to learn how to create even better lightning scenario from the very beginning. We are going to delete all Lightning actors in our level, but before I want to show you very important thing. for our meshes and objects to work really great with Lumen we need to convert them to Nanite so select all the meshes in the Megascans folder, go to this tab - select the static meshes, okay and now you will see this Nanite option. once you click it will convert all the measure into the Nanite. I already did it, so you have to repeat the process as well for all the 3D Plans. Okay, filter by static mesh and just repeat the process once you are ready we can go back to the Outliner, again collapse all to keep it clear and organized and search for our folder yes it's Lighting Post Atmosphere folder you will see different folders I don't want to get rid of all of them for example I want to keep light blockers but I want to delete everything else so select all the lights, delete the same with the Post Process Volume, Fog, we have to delete all of them okay. You can also notice some kinds of the meshes, which we are going to play function of the Gobo in our scene, I want to... I want to actually delete as well the trailer, which is cinematics and in our Cinematics folder I want to delete the default sequence, because we are going to create our own, so I like to keep it organized and clean. We're almost ready but we delleted all the lighting but you still see lighting in your shot okay first delete the cameras to get rid of all the objects, okay and now we need to select the World Settings option. Okay, so go down select World Settings, type force just like we did in the previous chapter and Force No Precompeted Lighting. Click okay, but still you will see all baked lighting so we need to go to the top panel select Build and search for Build Lighting Only, now everything is reset and I want to show you in this chapter very nice and quick way to create your lighting scenario from scratch. so we have to go to the window tap and select Environment Light Mixer, not many artists is using it however is a great way to work with your project. Just dock it in your main tab and you will see by one click you can create Sky Light, Atmosphere Sky, Atmosphere Light, also Volometic Clouds and Height Fog, as well you can control it inside mixer. Okay, it doesn't look good so far but we're going to work with it, right now I want to select all of them and to keep good naming convention just move them to the light folder. One more thing we need to obviously add Post Process Volume, okay and just like before type infinite extend, select so it will affect our whole level now move it back to the light folder and most of our work is done as I mentioned before in Light Mixer you can change some settings, for example you can select Volumetric Fog here. Okay try different approaches and see you in the next Lecture. 16. Interior Lighting: Hi, in this lecture I want to focus on preparing our shot so first select Post Process, go to Lens setting and in Exposure you can go with the auto however I prefer to go with the manual, it is quick reminder from the previous Chapter and now we can slowly try different Lightning Actors features, for example Exponential Height Fog, the second Fog data will be deactivated at random, I like to test different values before I decide how I want to create my scenes. Remember there are no good or bad values everything is very subjective it depends of your concept art ideas for your scenes. I'd like to try maybe change the start distance, yes 200 supposed to work fine. Let's play a bit with the Sky Light I want to test Real Time Capture as well I want to see the Cube Map option, so let's add the HDRI map to decide which approach is better, okay it looks quite good, however keep in mind we just started, so the final effects of our shot would be completely different. Okay now try again the Real Time and let's try different values for the intensity to see how our environment works with the Sky Light, for now I'm going to keep 0.8, okay great try different Lighting Actors, different features before you start creating your shots, okay now go... to the Cinematics tab and select Add Level Sequence basically we going to create new Master Sequence, let's name it Apartment. I want to create 4 shots, our destination folder will be Cinematics and the default shot duration let set up 4 seconds, okay click Create Level Sequence with Shots and we can slowly start the process of creating our Cinematics and creating our light. One more thing, be sure when you go to the Post Process type Lumen and check the method, it supposed to be Lumen as well the Reflections. Here you can also change the quality of Lumen, however it would be higher cost for your GPU, if you're going to work with Cinematics that's very important to check these settings every time you open new level as well you can select Ray Traced Shadows, both for the Directional Light and for the Sky Light. I see you in the next Lecture! 17. God Rays effect: Hi in this Lecture I want to show you how to create god rays, first things we need to change is Cast Ray Traced Shadows, we have it enabled but to create the really nice realistic god rays with Lumen we have to disable it inside our Directional Light actor. I'm going to show you later how it looks once is enabled okay, so be sure to check it and now we can go from that kind of the picture to that kind of the picture in less than 10 minutes, okay let's get started. So first drag and drop your sphere blueprint which we created in previous Lectures, okay, to have the reference for our Lightning actors. You can change the scale of it and obviously the position. The first actor I want to show you is going to be Directional Light. I already prepared shot inside the sequencer and I keyframed different values for specific lighting actors, so you can clearly see the difference when we change it. Okay first feature is the Intensity of the Light, I started with 8 and now I'm going to change it to 12. You can clearly see our reference spheres starting to look much more realistic. Another value is going to be Indirect Lighting Intensity, as you remember from previous Chapter it controls the bounce of the light on the other object and meshes so if we increase it to 4 it will create much realistic interior for our shot and again take a look at your reference spheres and the third feature is going to be Volumetric Scattering Intensity which basically controls our god rays effect so by standard we have it one and I'm going to increase it to 12. Now you can clearly see some kind of the god rays in our shot, if you type ray and enable Cast Ray Traced Shadows now you will understand why I asked you to disable that kind of the feature. I think our Directional Light looks perfect now we can focus on the second actor which is Sky Light, so I set up the default Intensity to 0.5 also I selected Cube Map and once I increased it to 4 it will create much more realistic visuals for our shot, especially if you look at the meshes as well as our foliage. The next important actor is going to be exponential Height Fog so we have three main values obviously first one is the Fog Density second one is the Second Fog Density, by default is going to be zero, so I want to increase it to 0.05 so you can clearly see the difference. So as you noticed the more Intensity in our Fog the bigger god rays affect in our shot, however if you look at our black and gray sphere right now they look kind of overexposed, so we need to start to control it and the best way to control it is actually inside the Exponential Height Fog, we have option for Scattering Distribution it will be less god rays in our shot, once we increased it. So again lower value - higher god rays effect, higher value lower effect, so we can control it as well here not only in Directional Light. The next thing we need to focus is obviously Post Process Volume. First one it's a Bloom if you're going to work with the cinematics good idea is to change to method to Convolution and I started first keyframe with value 0 and the second one I increased to 0.7, you can clearly see very realistic Bloom in your shot right now. However you have to be very careful and you have to test it in rendering because if you render in MRQ with Bloom it is little tricky a lot of times it works a little bit different than in a Viewport. Another settings for our shot is Chromatic Aberration, okay I don't like to keep it too high however I want to have very realistic shot so it's a good idea to go somewhere around 0.4, 0.6. The last one I wanted to show you is actually Lens Flares, so first keyframe is at Intensity zero and the second one we have 0.5, obviously you can change the tint you can change the size but I want to just to show you as a reference how you can change very quickly and very easy settings inside your lighting actors to create really amazing god rays. And the last actor I used in that particular shot is going to be Sky Atmosphere component. I wanted to tweak only two things inside Atmosphere Absorption I changed the colour a little bit and then I increased Absorption itself, which creates really nice warm atmosphere for my shot. Okay I think it looks really interesting again there are no good or bad settings everything depends of your concept now let's just play the whole sequence in a slow motion maybe like 0.25, so you can clearly see the difference Great this is our final shot and I have quick challenge for you I want you to prepare all lighting actors, create Master Sequence, find the best camera angles, be creative and experiment and finally capture your shot and I also wanted to show you the video I prepared especially for this course. 18. Create & Control Sublevels: Welcome in next Chapter. We'll create sublevels, first right click on the content folder create new folder let's call it Studio, then change the color of it let's make it blue left click on the Map folder, first we need to create completely new empty level right click on the Level let's call it studio. Okay double click to open it and save. As you can see it's completely empty level then go to the Window tab and select Levels, the new tab will appear you can see Persistent Level which is default Main Level, then go back to the Studio and we're going to create new folder, let's call it Sublevels. Open the folder and here we are going to create three different levels, first one is going to be 1Light_Source, second one 3Light_Source and last level let's call it GOBO. save it, now select all of them and one by one we can add them to our Level tab, so now we have four different levels first one is Persistent Level and we have three different Sublevels we can change, change the visibility and if you double click any of them it is going to be the active Main Level in your project, so now I want to add one mesh which you can download from the resources it's called Infinity Wall. You can select import all. Iou will have one basic M_Wall material you can open the mesh by double click on it. So this is a random studio setup you can use Infinity Wall you can use just plain you can create your own scenario for a studio I wanted to show you that kind of the approach because I think it's very easy to understand and very easy to follow. Okay let's just add our mesh into our level first one we're going to create 1Light_Source, so once you double click you will see this level will be highlighted in blue okay. If I select the Persistent Level and I add my mesh now you will notice that my mesh it's not in a 1Light_Source sublevel but it's actually in a persistent level okay how to change it select the mesh select the level you want to add the actor right click and select Move Selected Actors to Level. Okay right now if I disable visibility of Persistent Level you will see we still have this mesh inside our Main Level okay, one more thing I want to to download another asset which is called FPS Weapon it's free pack filter by free okay I already own it so you ... remember in the last chapters how to add to the project so just repeat the process show all project select your project and click at the project after you select the latest Unreal version, it will take moment to download it once you're ready you can save your project and I see you in the next Lecture. 19. Point Light: Hi in this lecture I want to focus on static lights first select our sublevel we created, 1Light_Source go to Place Actors you will see 3 main lights which is Point Light, Spot Light and Rectangular Light. Let's start with the Point Light. Okay reset the position and the rotation and I want to add some meshes to see how this actor behaves. Point Lights work much like a real world light bulb, emiting light in all direction from the light bulbs tungsten filament, however for the sake of performance Point Lights are simplified down and emiting light equally in all direction, from just a single point in space. Okay let's select the Mobility you have like before 3 main options. I want to select the Moveable option which means the light is totally dynamic and allows for dynamic shadowing because we're going to work with cinematics we don't have to optimise our shot. Then let's focus on features, the first one is Intensity, then we have the Light Color and another one is Attenuation Radius. Next one is Source Radius. It's radius of Light's Source Shape. Attenuation Radius bounces lights visible influence, then we have Soft Source Radius as well we can control the Length of our Source, plus like before we have Temperature option and Affect World and obviously Cast Shadows. I'm going to keep it at 4,000 next one is Indirect Lighting Intensity, you remember from the previous chapter our Directional Light Indirect Intensity and we have also Volumetric Scattering Intensity. Okay if you open the advanced tab you will see another options. Important one is Specular Scale, however I suggest to keep it at 1 we also have Shadow Resolution Scale, Shadow Bias and Slope Bias and one very interesting feature is Shadow Filter Sharpen. I will zoom in in the shot to show you exactly how it works in general the shadows in level depends of the position and the size of our Light Source for example if our Light Source is closer to our mesh our shadows will be sharper if it's in more distance position then we're going to get more soften shadows in our shot, you can see once I increased the Shadow Flter Sharpen the behaviour of our shadows changed if you scroll down also you can notice another options like Cast Translucent Shadows as well the Lighting Channels which allows dynamic lights to only affect objects when their lighting channels overlap. This is very useful especially for the cinematics, another important feature is Cast Volumetric Shadow Okay and as well we have Cast Ray Traced Shadows, we can enable that option and instantly you will notice different shadows in our shot. These are the main features of Point Light actor as well later I'm going to show you how to use light function and IED Texture inside our lighting actors. I see you in the next Lecture. 20. Rectangular Light: Welcome back I want to show you second static light it's called Rectangular Light, probably the most popular light in photography. Rectangular Lights emits light into a scene from a rectangular plane with a defined width and height. I will change the mobility to Moveable and Intensity as well. Next feature is obviously Color then we have Attenuation Radius, bounces the light visible influence like a Point Light or the Spot Light. Rectangular Light has a spherical attenuation radius. Another settings is Source Width and Source H.eight The larger the light source the softer the shadows will be in your scene the same applies to the distance between the object and the light source the farther the light actor is from the object in the scene the softer the shadows, the closer it is the sharper the shadows. Another feature is called Barn Door Angle and you can also change the barn Door Length, try different settings to find the ones which works the best for your project again we can use Temperature, we have Indirect Lighting Intensity and obviously Volumetric Scattering Intensity. In advance tab we have very similar option like we had with the Point Light. We can select the Lighting Channels, Cast Satic Shadow, Cast Dynamic Shadows or Affect Translucent Lighting. Okay I want to change Cast Ray Traced Shadows to show you huge difference in our shot, is especially visible when we're going to use Rectangular Light now you can clearly see the difference when we change the size of our actor as well we can change the Is Texture or add the Lightning Function Material to our Rectangular Li.ght Try different features, save your project and I see you in the next Lecture. 21. Spot Light: In this Lecture I want to focus on Spot Light. Spot Light emits light from a single point in a cone shape users are given 2 cones that shape the light the Inner Con Angle and Outer Con Angle. within the Inner Con Angle the light chieves full brightness as you go from the extent of the inner radius to the extent of the Outer Con Angle a fallout takes place softening around the Spot Light disc of illumination. The main features are basically very similar to Point Light and the Rectangular Light we have Intensity we have Attenuation Radius and to features I just mentioned the Inner Con Angle, let's just increase it and Outer Con Angle. You can notice difference in your scene. Again you can change the Source, Temperature in advance settings let's change it to Cast Ray Traceed Shadows enabled and if you scroll down again you will notice IES Textures especially for the Spot Lights they work pretty well and I actually prepared 4 different IES Textures which you can download completely for free! In next Lecture I'm going to show you how to use them, now I'm going to change different features to test behaviour of our Spot Light in our scene I like work with the Spot Light for many reason one of them is the GPU cost probably the Spot Lights are the cheapest from our static lights actors. Okay and basically this will work like a flashlight or stage can light, see you in the next Lecture. 22. Emissive Light: Welcome back, in this Lecture let's focus on another option to create light in our shot first create new folder in our Studio folder let's call it Materials. I'm going to create another folder here call it Emissive and we'll create the master material let's call it M_Emissive_Mat. Double click to open it now I need to add some notes as well I'm going to change the shading model to Unlit then when you press and hold 3 on your keyboard and you click the left mouse button you will create the Constant Color Vector press and hold M and left click to create Multiply note and the same once you press and hold S and left click mouse button you will create Scalar Parameter, let's call it Emissive _Intensity and now we're going to connect all the notes together. And I want to attach to Emissive Color, double click to change the color let's start with completely white for our Master Material and we can change as well the Intensity, however I'm going to keep it at zero. Just like before create the Material Instance. First color I think we can try blue or maybe white let's go with the white yeah duplicate and second one we can call it we can call it blue now we can save it and I'm going to place simple Sphere mash actor and I will change the standard material one of our emissive materials just increase the scale, okay select our Material Instance or you can drag & drop save it double click and now we need to change the parameters of our material So first one obviously is Emissive Intensity. To have emissive material we need to have intensity above 1 but first I'm going to change inside our Master Material our Vector to Parameter let's call it Color and now you'll see Global Vector Pameter Values and we can also control instance... material instance color of our material so let's try the blue and we need to go above 1 to see emissive effect in our shot let's delete our Spot Light and play a bit with Emissive Intensity. In Unreal Engine emissive materials give artist a very cheap and effective way to create the impression that the surface is glowing or casting light without using any of unreal standard light types. Emissive materials can act as a real light source that cast illumination into the environment around them or they can self illuminate without emitting light into the scene. I want to add another mesh because it's not two sided material I need to rotate it and let's change the Scale maybe to 10, it looks fine and for this mesh I want to select our second Emissive Material we call it white but actually it's just the name let's change the color to maybe something like red and I go with very high intensity. Okay but still we don't see any light in our shot except our mash itself okay one more thing you will notice that specific information is because I didn't change the viewport to default I had it cinematics because I'm going to create Master Sequence as well you can see once I selected the standard viewport it shows me the selected actors in my Level okay so it's actually very useful option if you work with the Sublevels. Okay the last thing we need to change to actually see our emissive light we need to add Post Process Volume so drag and drop our Post Process Volume you remember from the previous Lectures we need to change the size of it so go to the Details tab type Infinite and select Infinite Extent Unbound and still we don't see any effects so we have to go to the exposure like before I mentioned I like to work with the manual settings right now something change in your scene but actually still it's not what we want so we have to type lumen and actually we have to activate our global illumination method now you will see clearly emissive light in our shot and how it affects our meshes It's very interesting and very nice way to create your lighting scenarios in your project try different values for all the features and I see you in the next Lecture. 23. 1 Light Source Technique: In this lecture I want to show you how to turn this shot into that kind of scene we'll work through it step by step together let's get started. First I want to add our plane mesh to 3Light_Source sublevel select mesh select sublevel right click and move it and disable visibility of our 3Light_Source and I'm going to keep our sphere with emissive material for a moment in our shot maybe I'm going to use it and I want to add our Spot Light. Okay right click move into our sublevel. Great we are ready to go in Details panel I want to change the location I will reset it to 0 it will be much easier later to work with it. Disable sphere for now and we need to populate our level with meshes. I used actually Megascans for it you can use any meeshes you want but I like to use Megascans. I searched for a table that's the one I selected it's called Wooden Table it has very nice material kind of the old damage material as well I downloaded old plywood material to test it later with our mesh it's good it's good idea to experiment try different materials to find the best one for your shot as well I decided to download another materials for example like this one it's obviously up to you which one you want to use in your shot. Because you downloaded the full project which was called Megascans Apartment you already will have a lot of different meeshes, so if you want you can use one of them like for example that kind of the table okay another thing we needs to check we need to change our mesh to Nanite, probably you remember like we did it before. Okay now drag and drop our mesh into our scene. I'm going to change scale to 1.5 maybe 1 25 rotate and once I decide what kind of the angle I like to use I can slowly start to create our shot. Now I need to add our rifle so I decided to go with that one it's called KA 74 U we can use static mash and let's just set up our rifle in our shot. In classic photography especially in studio settings we can distinguish two main trends, one of them is creating a scene based on the single main light source we will discuss this approach in this Lecture and we'll create an entire scene using only one light source the Spot Light. Another concept involves using 3 light sources which will be the topic of the next lesson in this case we'll create one key light source and two supplementary ones however remember that when working with Unreal Engine you are not limited to traditional methods you can use multiple light sources if necessary to achieve the best effects. Okay now I want to create new folder let's call it Cinematic and again I'm going to create the Master Sequence you remember how to do it and I want to create 3 different shots it would be much easier for me to work with each sublevels once I will have 3 different, separate shots. Select folder Create Level with Shots. Great we have our Master Sequence select the first shot and now we have to work with our camera so let's try to find the best angle and obviously keyframe all your settings the focus for now I'm going to select do not override I can change the focus later once our shot will be ready to render. Remember it's only layout set up for now the final shot probably will be completely different however it's good idea to find interesting angle before we even start to populate our scene especially for cinematics it's very important to focus only on the area we're going to see in our shots that way you will save ton of time because you don't have to create anything what is behind your camera. Okay I think I will add to our shot as well some shells that one looks okay just changed surface snapping because shells will have reflective material it will works really nice with our Spot Light. Okay and maybe we can add the mesh from our apartment assets something like a bottle will be great okay we have military water bottle, looks really cool and just try different position okay great now change the material for our background okay I think we need to change tiling something like 8 okay now I'm going to try to change the material let's just change the roughness for this plywood material and try to attach it to our table. Alright it doesn't look bad however in the same time probably I'm going to stick with the standard one we will need to change only the roughness yes definitely I prefer the standard one material I don't like that one that's right change the roughness max roughness maybe to 0.4 and the minimum roughness 0.2 should be fine okay maybe 0.5; 0.2 oh I really like it it works great still we didn't work with our light you have to remember one thing the behaviour of the light depends of the materials in our shot you can clearly see it in this and in the next Lecture because every object and every material absorbs part of the light it is very important work with it in the same time. Okay now try to find the best camera for our shot. Okay and now I want to show you something I'm going to copy the position location actually of our rifle okay as well I'm going to select our objects and I'm going to move them to our Persistent Level so they will be visible in each of our sublevels. If you wanna keep some kind of the meshes or object in all your sublevel you can always keep them in the Persistent Level, okay again double click on our 1Light_Source you will see information that the current context level is 1Light_Source and we can play a bit with our sphere okay as well I need to delete cubes from previous Lecture and okay I'm going to show you very interesting method to work with the lighting I'm going to add the basic actor to our shot you remember I copied the location now I'm going to paste the location of our rifle to our actor great let's say our actor is somewhere in the middle of our mesh as well I want to select Actor Hidden in the shot because if I'm going to render I don't want to render this simple actor. Now I'm going to attach our Spot Light to our actor and as well I'm going to paste the location but I think I'm going to paste the location before actually I attach our Spot Light to the actor okay let's just reverse and do it again first paste the location of Spot Light and now I'm going to attach Spot Light to our actor. Okay great, you don't see anything so far but give me a second I'm going to show you why is it very useful so if I'm going to change the location of the Spot Light right now it still will be affected but our actor okay, so if I want to change the angle of our Spot Light now all I have to do is to control our actor in our shot that way you can get the full control over your Lightning actors and the position will be always relative to the middle of your shot especially for the studio shots it is super useful and very easy to create technique especially if you work with the Rectangular Light is very useful, I'm going to show you in the next Lecture how you can use it for a 3 different light sources. And still you can control the position of the Spot Light okay now I'm going add our actor number 2 to our Sequencer and I can keyframe that transition position of the actor. Okay and now you can try and play with different position of your actor to change how your Spot Light would affect your main mesh in your shot okay let's try different settings. Okay now I want to create another folder and I'm going to show you how to use IES Textures, first you need to upload them to your project just you can track and drop from your folder select your Spot Light, scroll down in the details tab until you will notice IES Texture window in the Light Profiles so once you add one of them you will see difference in your shot instantly okay I think I'm going to use number 4. okay now I have quick challenge for you prepare Master Sequence, use only one Spot Light actor, find the best camera angle, experiment with parameters and use IES Texture. Welcome back so this is our final shot I'm going to change the view to Detail Lighting, you maybe notice it's a little bit overexposed, however because I have only one source of light it actually works great also I changed one things I selected this use IES intensity of the light if you decide to go with this feature you have to be very careful and you need to play with very very small numbers so 0.006 actually is perfect one for that shot and as well I could change the mobility to Moveable especially if I decide to render this shot later on, also I decreased the Attenuation Radius, I changed the Inner Cone Angle to 16 and Outer Cone Angle to 50, plus Source Radius to 20. You can try your own values or you can copy the one I used and just test it in your project we have 8,000 temperature and increase the Volumetric Scattering Intensity because I want to check that shot with the Exponential Fog Height, however I'm not going to use it so let's just keep it at 1 then I select Cast Volumetric sShadows as well I changed the material on our floor so I selected Stained Patterned Floor you can find it as well in the Bridge Megascans. Okay as well incite our rifle material if you double click you can change some parameters so I changed the Specular Intensity to 0.8, you have 3 different materials for this mesh you can use each of them okay in the Post Process Volume also I didn't touch exposure I left it at 1.0 however I increased the Chromatic Aberration have kind of the little older picture view and I change slope to 0.8 obviously I increased the values for the Lumen quality and Final Gather Quality to 8.0 as well the quality of the Reflections to 2. Okay these are the main features for this scene I hope you'll create something amazing and I'll see you in the next Lecture. 24. 3 Light Source Technique: Welcome back in another Lecture I hope you created something really amazing using only one Spot Light. Now let's organise our workspace a bit select the rifle the table and the bullets right click and create the new folder let's just names folder 1 light okay and before you remember I moved all the meshes into the Persistent Level, however now I decided I want to move them to 1Light_Source sublevel. And Post Process I want to keep the same Post Process settings for every sublevel so I move Post Process to Persistent Level, plus I want to copy our Infinity Wall. Okay make visible the 3Light_Source, right click and move selected actor to this level okay now it looks much better so double click our 3Light_Source and we can start with our new shot. Okay go to the Details panel maybe we can change the Scale of Infinity Wall as well as you remember I kept this plane with emisssive material because I'm going to use it later, now let's change the material to the default one so we can clearly see how emisssive light affects our mesh, actually you can create shot using only emisssive lights again there are no bad or good settings everything is very subjective it depends of your concept art direction. Now I'm trying to find really good angle to add our mesh to the scene, change the camera. This shot I like to create something very simple kind of the side camera shot of one of our rifles I think we can select that one and now we need to set up position of our mesh. In the first scenario I want to create shot only with our mesh so let's say we can use it as well as an alpha render so we're going to have completely black background okay. In the second shot I would try to create something more natural, more realistic so we're going to keep the background or maybe I will try to imitate the scene where our rifle actually is laying on the concrete ground, concrete floor. Okay as you can see before I selected our sublevel anything I added is already here and now we need to repeat the process from the previous Lecture so I'm going to add another actor I just copy the location and I will try to move our actor in the middle of our rifle. Something like that and go to the Place Actors tab and we are going to use Rectangular Light for this particular shot probably you're already familiar with Rectangular Light I hope you spend some time trying different features. Okay, once you're happy with the position and the distance from our mesh of course we need to rotate it and change to Moveable okay now it affects our mesh as well you can see the shadows on the wall, next step again is going to be attach our Rectangular Light to our actor number two. I'm going to change Intensity maybe to 4 and I want softer shadows so obviously I need to change the size of our Lightning Source, so maybe go with like 120 with the Width, maybe 200 even and the Height we can go like 160. Save your project and attach our Rectangular Light to actor No. 2 so you can directly control it via your actor in your shot. I'm going to keyframe our camera I think I need to have a wider angle so we're going to decrease this parameter yes maybe 28 mm will be fine maybe even less we can always change it later okay keyframe the position and Manuel focus actually I'm going to change to Tracking one and we're going to track our rifle okay we have our actor ready we have first light ready now quick challenge for you. I want you to create 3 actors and attach Rectangular Light to each of them, keep playing with emisssive material in your scene, find perfect angles for your lightning actors. Welcome back you can see my shot how I decided to create lighting angles and the scenario of our shot. You may be surprised because it looks very odd and very strange it's because I like to select different colors for each Rectangular Light once I'm going to create final shot it's much easier for me to decide if I like it or not as well I can clearly see the shadows and how each of our light is actually affecting our environment and our main mesh in the scene. Okay also if I enable visibility of the plane you can clearly see how our emisssive light reacts with our environment and our mesh. Okay now let's just reset the color and you will actually see completely different shot. Great it's starting to look good, keep in mind we have completely black environment so once we enable visibility of plane you will see a little bit of different exposure okay as well I changed some settings inside of the Post Process before so it will affect our shot. Now let's check the Lighting Only and Detail Lighting section as you can see it looks really good and you remember in previous Chapter we created reference BP Spheres so I think right now maybe the good moment actually to try to use them. I saved them in HDRI folder I think yes that's correct so drag and drop our BP and we can clearly see the refference for our shot okay I think it looks really good if you look at the black grey and the white spheres they're looking very close to the perfect scenario and still we have completely black background. Okay I will delete it for now and I will focus on our mesh and just to show you now I'm going to change the position of our actor with the first light and you can clearly see how it affects our rifle use my settings only as a reference but try to create your own unique scenario as well you can use another match if you want it doesn't have to be rifle it can be anything however I like to use weapon in this example because of the metal structure of it we'll see very nice Lumen reflections in our shots. I'm trying to find perfect lighting position, something like this. Okay great, now let's activate our plane and I want to create a second scenario so I'm going to select our Infinity Wall okay for a moment just disable it and I want to show you as well something else if we change the materials you will see clearly the difference so that material doesn't have so much reflections but actually it looks really good right now okay just reset the material go back to the first one okay and again select the Infinity Wall and now I need to keep it much closer to our rifle, like I mentioned before the second scenario we are going to create shots where our rifle actually is laying on the ground okay. So this Megascan material will works perfect okay and I really think I will keep our plane as actually the 4th lightning material, okay I want you to test different features different values. So our Rectangular Light No. 1 is our main light source, second one is Rectangular Light 2 which is in on different angle and the third one actually we are using it to lighten our background. On the top of our shot we also have our plane with emisssive lighting, so our shot is starting to look really great and at the end of this Lecture I want to show you the final effect of our shot I created. 25. GOBO Light Function: Welcome back in this Lecture we're going to create GOBO and is used in lighting features to create a projected image or pattern, term is acronym for Go Between Optics, describing the location where it needs to be positioned in the light path of a lighting's picture. First as you can see I copied the camera from previous shot then I opened last one the third shot paste the camera and I'm going to delete the one which was created automatically. So I basically will keep the same settings just like before and now I'm going to select the new sublevel, but just before let's just copy all our meshes, because we're going to use them in another shot however we are going to change uh maybe materials, maybe position of the lighting so we want to copy them. Then right click, Move Selected Actors to Level and the same we are going to do for our actors and our Rectangular Lights as well for our plane mesh. CTRL + D just to copy them duplicate okay great just to check everything's works fine great I like to keep my Outliner organized all the time it's much easier to work with cinematics that way Right so now we need to create another, another folder let's call it GOBO and I already prepared 8 different textures for you but before we go there let's first check our Project Settings and search for the Virtual Texture okay. I want you I want you to disable "Enable virtual texture at texture import", because our Apartment project at the random it has it enabled once you upload any texture to this project they will be converted to VT. the problem is Lighting Function Material is not going to work with Virtual Textures and you're going to get error, so that's the easiest way actually to do it now create the material let's create the master material call it M_MatFunction_Master. I think I used space yeah okay okay great double click to open it. Okay now press and hold T just click the left mouse to create the texture sample and then search for the cheap contrast we're going to connect these notes then create the Scalar Parameter let's call it Contrast so we'll have the option to control contrast of our Gobo if you decide to do it and then we need to have another note which is called tiling so search for MF_Tiling and you will have some kind of the function inside system or maybe they will be from Megascans so double click to open and check you supposed to see something like that okay. So we'll have text or coordination with all the tiling function like in Megascans materials now change that Textue Sample to Parameter, just like before and let's call it Texture. Now we need to change one more thing select our material function master and change the shading model is okay actually we going to change the material domain to light function now you will see only Emmisive Color available, so connect our result and you will get error but that's just because you don't have any note first just select all of them and press C on your keyboard to create comment option and we can call it let's call it Light Mat, so it will be much better organized now we need to add texture let's select one of them for example that one. Okay, apply and save as you can see our simple Light Function material is already created and just like before I'm going to create Material Instances so we can control our texture and our contrast directly inside the Material Instance, so let's name it "MI" keep correct naming convention and let's type 01 probably and we can copy to have two of them so we can clearly see the difference in our shot and this can be No. 02 so once you open it you will notice the tiling offset option exactly the same like in the Megascans so we saved a lot of time instead of creating this function from the scratch we just use the one we have in the engine and we're going to change maybe for this texture it will be fine and now we need to save and add our Material Instance Lighting Function to our Light Source. Okay I think I'm going to work with the position of our Infinity Wall and maybe I would change the material as well okay, so you can clearly see the difference in our shot. Okay select another material I think I downloaded something really nice yeah this dirty stone wall let's try that one oh okay it looks really cool I think we need to increase the tiling maybe 8 yeah it looks great okay and I'm going to change the Aperture to decrease the depth of field so we clearly will see our GOBO effect in our shot. Okay now select the Rectangular Light maybe I will keyframe it as well here yeah let's just increase intensity as well of our work and glad light maybe to 4 yeah and that's fine. okay and select one of our created Material Function Material go to the Light Function and just add it here okay, great but you don't see anything why is that because we need to change tiling of it so let's go the higher value maybe like 10 okay now you're supposed to see really nice effect in that example I'm using rifle but imagine you can use for any kind of the mesh it can be product advertisement can be anything okay I forgot to keyframe intensity I think just change it again yeah now it's 4 great it's saved, so we have also option to control our Light Function Material for example you can change the Scale as well you can change Fade Distance. I want to show you if I decrease it completely how it will affect our Material. Okay I think it's easy to notice difference the last one is Disabled Brightness you can use that option however it should be between 0 to 1 the best way to control it probably is do it inside the Material at least I prefer that kind of approach so one more thing, you thinking probably right now like what about the position of our GOBO like do I have to change the position of light? No because we have MF Tiling notes we can change the offset of x and y axis and very easily control the position as well we have rotation angle so we have full control over our texture. Okay great, now try another another material let's test the second one the same situation we need to increase tiling and I think I'm going to change the background color to just the default one, it will be much easier to see... see it on the white material. Yeah let's change let's change it so just reset yeah now it's really good and as you remember we also created the Cheap Contrast note so you can also control the contrast of your GOBO in your scene you can add other notes if you want if you are familiar with unreal materials and create really, really realistic very nice effect imitating the real world, for example biomes. I want to show you one more thing in this video there is option in window to add also something called Light Mixer which gives you the option to control different lights in your shot, you can control the most important features directly right here you don't have to use it however sometimes if you have many lights is very good idea also you can control the light in channels, okay that's it, I'll see you in the next Chapter. 26. PNG & EXR Renders: Hi welcome back let's focus on rendering your shot you created amazing scene, amazing lighting scenario now we need to create your shot let's start with the first 1Light_Source sublevel. So open shot number one and what you need to do, you have to add the visibility for your sublevels so select Add option and here you will see Level Visibility Track. Once selected the Visible channel should appear all you need to do is add another level visibility the Hidden one and now just drag and drop your Level to sequencer so 1Light_Source will be visible and the other ones 3Light_Source and GOBO is not going to be visible. So we need to drag them to the level - Hidden Viisability Track okay, you have to save and once you render right now everything supposed to works fine. You need to repeat this process for each of your scene so just, just as exercise do the same thing for the second shot, so we used 3Light_Source so we need to add it to the Visible Level Track and the Level Hidden Track we're going to add another two sublevels, save and basically you're good to go. And if you already know how to use the Movie Render Queue you don't have to watch that part but if you are not familiar you need to go to the Plugins and select Movie Render Queue. Okay if you wanna render also alpha levels you need to select Render Queue Additional Render Passes as well there is new function in Unreal Engine created by Nvidia is called DLSS or DLAA support it's actually really great option to use. It increases the speed of your rendering even if you doesn't have very strong GPU, another thing we need to change when you go to the your lighting source and your type ray you can also change the behaviour of Ray Tracing in your shot, because I have Cast Ray Tracing enable I can change it as well I can control Ray Tracing inside our Post Process Volume for example we can control Ambient Occlusion, we can control the Number Samples per Pixel, Intensity, the same we can do with the Translucency. Good idea is to experiment and test different settings and try to render few different scenarios for your shot and because you want to render amazing shot I already prepared settings for your render so you can go to the Master Sequence Select option to render then you will see all your shot which you want to render if you want to render all of them just keep it random but you can disable for example shot No. 1 or shot No. 2 then click settings and if you go to render 2K settings you will see render setups I created for you all you have to do you need to copy that file and paste them inside your content folder I prefer to paste them inside the cinematic folder okay first things first so PNG sequence we are going to create PNG you will have Anti-aliasing option then you will have Console Variables the most important one is Screen Percentage if you don't have strong graphic card just go with 100% then we have DLSS I selected DLAA, however you can go with ultra quality as well we have Game Overrides and you can see the Flush Grass Streaming, Flush Streaming Managers, I disabled this 2 options because some of the environments doesn't work properly when we have this option selected and just doesn't render foliage so I decided to save it that way so you can render probably any kind of the environment. The second option for the highest quality is EXR so I selected DWAB compression then if you go down to Anti-aliasing Spatial Sample Count 2 Temporal 32 should be fine then you need to have also Color Output because I decided to do not use, do not use ACES so we have Disable Tone Curve selected, then you have again Console Variables, again DLSS options, Game Override and of course remember to change the Output directory because probably it will be the one I saved for my project, once you are ready you can click accept and happy renders! 27. Path Tracing: In this Lecture I want to focus on Path Tracing, okay if you go to the View mode you can select Path Tracing because we enabled it, as you remember in this project before I think actually it was enabled at random then select Post Process and type path and you will see seven different options for the Path Tracing my suggestion is to test each of them. The first two will increase the quality of your shot however it also makes your rendering much, much longer. We currently have two options Path Tracing which in theory offers much better quality and Lumen with Ray Tracing. In practice in the latest version of Unreal Engine the difference is actually barely noticeable, but the difference in rendering time is significant in favor of Lumen. The last one for example Denoiser is selected at random, however I found it much better if I disable it so again you have to test different approaches. Okay and just like before I prepared Custom Render Settings for you so all you have to do is to upload to your content folder, so you can notice Path Tracer. I decided to go with EXR files but you can change it to PNG it's up to you, then we have Console Variables, very similar options like before. Okay, once you're ready you can render your shot. And just like that we reach the end of the Course. Congratulations on making it through!!! I'm sure that working with lighting in Unreal Engine will now be something you truly enjoy wishing you lots of success with your upcoming projects Thank You for having You here!