Re-lighting

I chose these scenes because I wanted to improve my lighting skills. As all learning scenes from Epic are almost 100% ready to use, I used the scenes to focus on lighting, composition and post process.

It wasn’t my first attempt at lighting using Unreal Engine 4 but I still learned a lot doing these projects. Relighting scenes are a very effective way to train, learn and improve saving a lot of time not having to create all the assets and textures.

Principles

There are two ways you can look at lighting for video games: a technical one and an artistic one.

For the artistic part (the one I prefer to be honest), lighting plays a critical role in setting the mood for any level but it also makes other artists’ works shine! Lighting can totally break a scene and that’s why it is so important. Even a simple grey box lighting can set a mood or highlight some level design elements. When a player plays the game you worked on, he will feel differently depending on the lighting of the area. Colors, luminosity, effects (fog, volumetric lights…) will affect how the player feels about the environment he is evolving in.

Technically speaking, it’s a matter of UVs settings, lightmap resolution, memory constraints, and guiding the player through the level (you can’t have a too bright or too dark area, or the player will feel weird about it).

With the technology available today, you have different ways to light a video game. You can use dynamic lighting, that allows you to have real-time interaction with lights, but at a performance cost. The other way consists in using a full or partial baked lighting. This method allows you to use Global Illumination: you can tweak how light bounces on the environment, shadows, and light propagation are more accurate, smoother, more realistic overall.

[Screen dynamic vs Baked lighting]