Post-production

Thanks! I work 100% in UE4 for all lighting and shading – no touch ups afterward in Photoshop (it’s part of the fun challenge of attempting to create realistic scenes in UE4) For lighting, I tend to keep things very simple. Most of my scenes just have a single skylight and directional light. The trick is to constantly keep tweaking values between the lights and post process settings- it usually takes quite a while per scene to find the right balance, but it’s the part that is the most important. You have to train yourself to see what looks good. For example, I see a lot of people with extremely strong bloom effects, really blurry DOF and very dense fog- all of these are things that should be used VERY carefully, if at all. They can instantly take a realistic looking scene and make it look super fake and flat. As for skyboxes, I prefer to use HDRis to light the scene- you can find decent ones online or shoot them yourself. Most procedural skies that I have seen look super fake to me and really kill the realism right away. The TrueSky plugin for UE4 looks very interesting however, something I am excited to look into sometime in the future.