Then I use number hotkeys to switch between various positions on the scene to see what Ii got and check for artefacts. After that I change lightmap resolution for entire scene (at this point I just throw in number that makes sense from the mesh importance/distance and scale), usually its 128 for distant objects, 256 or 512 for everything else and 1024 in rare cases or very important piece of geometry. Then I build the scene and check it again for artefacts, tweak some light intensity, position,scale, color etc, and tweak lightmap resolutions.

After that I build lights again and this cycle can be repeated 1-2 or many times, it depends on the results. Of course for gameplay scenes all the numbers and some little things can be different as well as indoor locations (like for distant objects I can set 32 or 64 lightmap resolution and in some areas I actually can use only optimized dynamic lights for saving RAM but that is optimization stages and we didn’t bother with it much in this particular scene).

So when I am happy with the results, the lighting stage is finished and I usually start to tweak post-process volumes. Peter is helping me with some advices about this and that and overall feel at all stages because my eyes can lose focus over time when you do the same thing over and over in the scene. Of course, this workflow might change a bit from time to time and you never get perfect sequence (you might tweak lights after for example 3 light build) but generally I do lighting this way.

Creating Fire

Peter: Fire and smoke is made using Unreal Cascade (Particle Editor inside Unreal Engine). It’s very powerful tool, it allows you to create many cool effects such as snow, rain, explosions and so on. For torch emitter we used 6 particle groups, 4 for fire and 2 for smoke. There’s nothing special about it – you can explore starter content in Unreal Marketplace and see how it’s done by Epic. You can find many different particles there.

Using Unreal Engine 4

Peter: UE4 is amazing engine. It allows reuse of materials and objects via material instances, vertex painting and material ID masking. Material functions is also very cool way of incapsulating individual materials such as sand, metal or rock and blend a few of them in material.

Andrew: I worked with UDK (UE3) since first beta and after long time spent with it most awesome thing about UE4 is that you don’t need to learn it from scratch. Of course it has some cool new features and much more user-friendly shipping but the main thing for me is that I can use my techniques and tricks I’m already familiar with.

Building the Environment

Peter: I think the main thing to remember is to keep it manageable. Don’t make too huge environments if you don’t have strong understanding of how you can pull it off. Instead, you can make small-scale but pretty scene, finish it in reasonable amount of time.