Finally the lantern itself! It might look like it’s just a pointlight, but in fact, there are quite a few different things at play. First of all, there are in fact 3 point lights for optimal control of the spread. There is also a small pointlight for the little glow effect inside the lantern. There is a ‘light cookie’ or alpha image for the shadowcasting of the lantern. Inside the lantern, I’ve put a small moving mesh with an emissive material that changes intensity to simulate a flame. And last but not least, the shadow on the cliff wall (from the locomotive) is casted by a spotlight just in front of the lantern.

If anyone is keen on learning more I could try to do a full, more detailed lighting tutorial on this scene and share it with the fine folks of 80.lv. Let me know in the comments! Also, any questions can be sent to me here.

Post-Processing

During the final week, I did a lot of polishing and experimenting with what looked crisp and what didn’t. There were also two minor ‘tricks’ to make sure I kept as much of the sharp details as possible. One is quite simple: increase the screen percentage. This can be either in the engine or when you render out a screenshot. I took my final renders at 4k and then downscaled them in photoshop to 1920×1080. That way it keeps the details in there a lot better. You can do this realtime, but it’s not ideal for your framerate. A more framerate-friendly trick is adding a sharpness filter in your post-processing! It’s surprisingly easy to figure out and I’m actually surprised at how few people do it. I think I discovered it on the Unreal forum years ago. I made a quick free tutorials for it, you can find it here.