Materials

The emissive materials are the really awesome part of this whole lighting breakdown! Unreal Engine 4.18 added multi-bounce indirect lighting. In this scene, the emissive intensity in the material is set to 15, but 5-10 is usually plenty in my previous tests and re-lighting examples where I also used emissive materials to dictate the lighting. Upon checking on “Use Emissive for Static Lighting” I set the emissive boost from 1.0 up to 5.0 for most assets using emissives for lighting. If the material is predominantly emissive, say a cube that’s just an emissive material, setting it at 1.0 or 2.0 can generally work fine. If it’s a series of small emissives, say little emissive windows on a ship exterior for a sci-fi scene, setting it upwards to 50 might work better. Periodically checking the level in detailed lighting mode or lighting only is a better way to really see if the emissive material boost is set too high or too low. Another amazing feature of this is when you use volumetric fog it properly interacts with the emissive materials! So if you’re looking for some ambient lit colored fog, this is a fairly nice way to do it and in my tests pretty cheap too. For the reflections, I kept it mostly the same as I got it from Wiktor’s original scene. The quality is set to 50 and roughness to 0.6 as is the default. Setting the quality up to 100 appears noisy and you end up losing most of the nice chrome-like reflectance. Color Grading also played a major role in the feel of the scene. The most important alteration was the highlight gain adjustment along with the global saturation, gamma, and contrast. The LUT is also critical in this scene to get the blue-orange contrast. For the LUT I just used the Strong Blue Tint LUT from the Amply LUT Pack by Amplify Creations on the Unreal Marketplace.