Creating a photorealistic rain scene in Unreal Engine | lumen tutorial

hey guys welcome back to my channel I'm Han and  today we're going to talk about behind the shots In behind the shots I take some scenes from  my short film and break down the thinking   and creative process and some techniques that  involved so in today's behind the shots let's   take a look at how did I push the Unreal Engine  Lumen to the limit in this rainy night scene Batman was probably the most beautiful and  poetic movie that came out last year in my   opinion I loved how they portrayed the Rainy Night  city of Gotham the lighting and the color was so   well art directed and stunning so I use it as the  main reference to try to capture the essence of   a rainy night in unreal so as always please make  sure you stay to the end for the bonus tip [Music] Matrix demo was the perfect setup base for what  I needed in this shot in terms of location the   challenge is how to make it not look like a  Marketplace asset we'll talk about that in   a bit I needed a spot that has enough depth in  the street for objects layering also not to show   two repetitive buildings windows that looks  artificial if we observe the movie screenshot   closely they all have a great depth in every  location both in the physical layout and also   in the lighting so that would be the general  idea of the location that I'm looking for okay I think this corner will do even though the  building or Street doesn't look uh particularly   interesting yet we can always set dress up later  and keep in mind I always look for opportunities   to tell stories in the environment and it can  be simple as some trash cans on the sidewalk a   parking sign in the background and audience might  not read the text or read the size clearly yet   but having them in the scene will help you to  ground the render and make it more believable okay now let's bring the traffic in driving unreal  is so much fun I feel the Matrix demo vehicle   setup actually has a lot more subtlety and nuances  motion and than the template one especially in   the suspensions if you plug your controllers  in Via a Playstation or Xbox controller you   can actually use it to use the analog control  to control the vehicle a lot more precisely check out this short video I put out on how  to set it up and have fun driving [Music] so the animation recording was done to the preset  Matrix car rig and if we want to use a customized   model or customized car you can just simply rig  the wheels or the parts that are moving you don't   have to rig the whole card and transfer the wheel  animation from the recorded skeletal mesh to your   customized rig and in terms of the camera I wanted  to keep it very subtle and controlled motion and   but sells the feeling that if as if the car is  pulling over right in front of you so a small   push should just do it and if you want to know  more about the camera trick check out my last   video about how to make CG camera more realistic  now let's shut off all the existing lighting to   see you can see the emissive material from the  windows is contributing a lot to the overall   Lumen GI still so instead of going into the each  material to tone them down I was just going to   bring down the camera exposure globally and now  let's go back to the reference there's almost no   strong directional light in any rainy scene in  the movies or in the render um because the sun's   blocked by the clouds but we can still keep a very  diffuse the light there just to add a little bit   more to the ambient so it's not a pitch black  and another biggest thing in any rainy night   look is that you can tell all the light sources  are diffused and uh almost a little bit glowy   either diffused by the rain or the water on the  lens uh especially in the reflections so let's   first bring in the road surface a little bit less  rough basically crank up the reflection a little   bit in the material and we can see the reflection  are starting to look a bit more interesting   um because it's now picking up all  the colors from the surrounding lights   and for this shot I want to make the car either  backlit or silhouetted dropping of volumetric fog   I want to use the fog to actually shape the car  and it's just to separate it from the surroundings the next thing let's to break down the boring  sidewalk a little bit we can drop in some   storefronts from the kid bash but remember  we're not going to see those stores clearly   we're not going to read what each store is  so it doesn't really matter what store we put   them in but think them more for a lighting  opportunities and how can they show colors   in the reflection and more on the silhouette of  the store if we pick up a little bit in the fog   and how the silhouette's gonna look and just  pick something that is more interesting so uh   now let's drop in some extra lights to push the  those kind of stylized the Noir contrasty look   and for this specific scene when I'm dropping  in the light I'm paying attention to the color   that it adds to the fog so I use a slightly  different color for each light to make the   gradient more interesting but obviously not on  the difference you know side of the spectrum and   for some lights I actually even put a texture  on them to add even more variation to the hue oh here's the bunch of the emissive cards with  textures like uh Street photos it's just put   them off camera I will hide inside the fog and  they can be either read as a billboard or some   defocused uh storefront light and because Lumen GI  actually picks up the emissive material so their   color will get contributed back to the overall  Global GI and it creates some really interesting   reflection and the subtleness it's just hard  to get sometimes with a solid light color   and don't forget to pay attention to the overall  image and check if it has a nice gradient overall   that's basically my way to avoid creating a flat  image so always check for gradient either left to   right or inward outwards in this case it's  more of like inward outboard gradients and   um use extra light to layer the buildings and  the layer the objects for example this building   right here the light comes behind it and it  separates the foreground building with the   background so the screen right this whole chunk  doesn't look like a black blob it has layers   and uh what else we can do okay let's later on  ADD uh we can add some red tail light to make   the color palette even a bit more interesting  because right now we are sitting somewhere   around this warm orange and cool uh blue on  the street so sprinkle a little bit red tail   light too just to make the image a little bit  more interesting but not to shifting too far   away from the main color theme so okay the general  look is getting there let's now crank up the rain   um if we study the reference carefully we can  try our best to capture uh the essence of the   Rainy look like what makes the look rainy so first  thing if you'll notice the sidewalk right now it's   still a bit of a repetitive a simple it doesn't  look wet enough so we want to break that up a   little bit and introduce some puddles so we can  feel the water is accumulating uh on the sidewalk   and the second thing is obviously the ring drop  linesand the ring Drop lines is especially obvious   or more pronounced around the hot spots or light  sources and don't forget the ripples in the ground   I think the ripples on the ground are probably  sells the wetness more than the drop lines so   having those small ripples moving and expanding  you know very subtly on the edge of the frame it   can really add more life to the lifeless concrete  of the sidewalk and to create that rain material   like consistent look I use the rain material from  the marketplace as a starting point and it gives   some great animated normal material function which  you can then integrate it into your main Shader to   the car Shader to the pavement Shader Etc but  in this case for the ground it's like consists   of hundreds of goes so it would be a nightmare to  go through every Shader so what I did is I just   duplicated the Geo and lift it up a little bit  and made a transparent material with only the rain   Ripples and because the ripples is in the normal  and if we pipe in a fake sort of rasterized the   refraction it can create some broken reflection  look but still has the ripples there and also   I added some Splash element just to break up  the smooth reflection just a little bit more and the same thing with the car material just  integrate the ring drop Trail material function   from the marketplace into the car Shader you  can add it to the last step because the water   you know all the sh all the color Shader happens  at the bottom and the water happens on the top   all right last step the ambient add some fog Mist  smoke wisps anything you can to make the audience   feel the air inside the scene will help to  increase the realism but keep them subtle   and always make sure that the wind direction is  consistent throughout every um sort of ambient   source that is one mistake I see a lot of people  make and that I can actually small detail can   either break or make a shot oh and bonus tip  so when you have a moving light source and a   volumetric fog in the scenes sometimes you will  notice the light source will have this strobing   effect in the fog and there are actually a couple  Cvars that can tweak uh or increase the refresh   rate of the volumetric fog and I pack them in a  blueprint you can just have this one toggle I call   it a cinematic Fog it does come with a heavier  performance cost and um but for a cinematic   purpose it should be fine and you can download  the blueprint here to try it out the last step   is grading grading I actually consider its more of  a preference things like a color filter so I don't   think I will cover in full length in this video  um but one thing I want to mention is I added a   bit more glow and bloom in Nuke and stretch them  vertically to sell the wetness on the lens look [Music]   okay so that wraps up the workflow for this shot  but the principles like lighting and environment   storytelling can be shared across different  contexts as well so I hope this video has been   helpful for you and if there's any other topic  you want me to dive deeper or break down more   leave a comment and let me know if you haven't  please subscribe there's a lot more coming on   this channel and don't forget to check out the  demo reel I put out lately sit back relax enjoy

Channel: Unreal Han

Views: 137,845

Keywords: unreal tutorial for beginners, unreal tutorial series, unreal lighting night, unreal lighting setup, unreal lighting exterior, unreal lighting settings, lumen ue5, lumen unreal engine 5, unreal filmmaking, unreal film production, unreal engine night lighting, unreal engine 5 lighting setup, unreal engine 5 matrix, unreal engine 5 cinematic

Id: FTrCevoXqaA

Length: 11min 46sec (706 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 08 2023