Lighting

I didn’t touch the lighting until all my assets were placed in the right location with their corresponding textures and materials. I wanted the main room where the hero prop is located to have a warm feeling and a blue-ish tone for the dark areas. I made sure the sunlight was hitting the hero prop to make it stand out. I added artificial lights on some walls, back door, and other assets to make them pop as well, but leaving the backside darker with a blue-tone was key in making the main room stand out. Lastly, I added a little bit of fog on my lights by using the new volumetric fog feature UE4 now provides for a more filmic look. Emissive lights also played an important role during this process, making sure they were evenly distributed, with their proper tones and values.

The project took me around 6 months to complete, it was my first time attempting to create a true game environment where the player could walk around and feel immersed (at least I hope so!). The hardest part was coming up with interesting sci-fi shapes for my normal baking. It was a process that took me several iterations to make it feel like a terraforming machine on the planet. Once I got my shapes ready, everything else developed organically.

Pedro C. Prieto, Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev