Just as mentioned in the “Kitchen 1930” article (which is an incredible piece which you should check out if you haven’t! ) lighting is a constant development. It changed all the time with my scene. I referred back to the Arch-viz examples and saw the use of spotlights being bounced off a reflector, whilst this result is extremely effective I wanted the houses outside of the window to be visible so using this method didn’t meet my requirements. It also meant I was getting more bloom and lens flare than I wanted.

Being as I had the apartment open from two angles I wanted light to come in through both. This meant I had to include two directional lights, which is an unusual setup but for me the directionals help the realism of the scene tremendously, especially as they bounce off the carpets which then bring out the normals really well. Neither directional is too intense (I think I have them both set to around 6) but they achieved the result I was after.

I also have a skylight in the scene on a low intensity of 1, I felt as I was increasing the intensity the brightness was washing away the textures and the atmosphere wasn’t quite there. Keeping it low meant that there was the right amount of dark and light contrast in the scene – of course by having this contrast I had to play about with the speed up/speed down of the auto exposure as passing windows on a camera shot would cause a few seconds of readjustment, which was too detrimental to the camera shots.

The spotlights are doing more work than you would think, especially the four that are hanging from the ceiling which have an intensity of 500 attenuation radius of 1000 and outer cone angle of 60. Its surprising how dark the scene becomes without them.

The point lights around the scene are all fairly low intensity and only cover a small space. One of the major difficulties for me has been lamp shades effectively working, I’ve found that making the shades material subsurface which gets a fairly good result, but does make the texture color ‘pastelle-ish’. I will keep searching for a better way to represent them!

The scene also uses maximum ambient occlusion in the post process volume and uses the Circle DOF with a focal distance of around 70 and a scale of 1. The temperature of the scene is 7000 giving it a slightly warmer feel. Finally there is an exponential height fog that starts the fog at a distance of 500 and a low density of 0.02. This combines with the ambient occlusion in the alcoves aside the fireplace for a really nice effect.

The scene has a few particles around it, the dust, which is slightly edited from the starter content, a fire particle I made and also the smoke coming from Sherlock’s Pipe. I think they all help breathe a little life into an otherwise static environment!

(Scene breakdown images)

The Choice of Unreal Engine 4

I’ve never used UDK, UE4 is the first engine I was introduced to, and how awesome it is. It’s perfect for my scene in its cluttered state, it holds a huge amount of items, textures (often bigger than they probably should be) but it shows no sign of struggling.