FULL Guide to Product Lighting in Unreal Engine 5

[Music] today's video is going to be all about lighting and product lighting as well but you can apply these techniques for any scene that you want so we'll do a studio lighting setup we'll do like a dark and Moody setup up I'm going to go over Goos so static and animated Goos as well as how to control them uh I'll do some more detail stuff with spotlights and how to get a more realistic look on your spotlights and shadows and I'm also going to do an outdoor sunlight type of scene if that's the vibe you're after as well and finally I'm also going to show you how to organize all of these things using the sequencer and Su levels and all of that stuff as well as the basic project setup so it's a big one but I reckon it's going to be super useful and hopefully you guys like it and let's get started okay so I'm in Unreal Engine 5.4.2 and in this version they have fixed the crashing bug with this menu so now we don't need to worry about that anymore so a super quick scene breakdown I've just got this Studio background and I've just imported my product here as an fbx so I used the file import into level tutorial and then selected my fbx and in the options menu you can choose to import it as a single blueprint and what that does is it makes this guy which you can then also update you can like repport so if you make modeling changes you can uh update your model and what that does is it makes this blueprint actor which is where I've applied all my materials in this which means um when I'm in any level I can just drag in this guy where is he yep he's over here let me go back to him I can just keep dragging out as many as I want and they have their materials applied and everything is contained in a single blueprint actor you don't have to do that method that's just what I chose to do for this one and as for materials I'll just go into it real quick I'm just using a simple anodized metal for the lid and then I'm using a brushed metal for the bottle and then these text elements are decals that I made in illustrtion so I just went online found a similar font and then exported that out as a PNG or you can just export out as a JPEG and then plug in your Alpha Maps but anyway that's not the focus of this tutorial we're going to go over how to set up product lighting so I'm assuming you've got your model ready and we'll also be setting up cameras and I'm going to show you how to organize a bunch of different lighting scenarios within one project so I'm just in a blank freshh level and I've just got again my Studio background and my bottle and I'm just in unlit mode right now because I have no lights in the scene so just so you can see what's going on I will go to unlit and the first thing I'm actually going to do is just add a base light for just so we can see what's happening so I'm just going to go to the top menu drag in a rectangular light and I'm going to zero out the coordinates and my object is placed at the origin except I've just moved M it a little forward so that way I know where everything is and I'm just going to move this guy up and down or rotate it down go out of game view you can do that by pressing G by the way and just move this guy up cool so the first thing we're just going to quickly do is set up our camera so to do that I'm just going to go back to this menu draag go to cinematic and drag in a c camera actor and for some reason it is not dragging onto my uh my background and I wreck and it might be because it is a 2d object so there's no Collision so I'm just going into wireframe view here by pressing alt two by the way so I'm just using these shortcuts to swap between these three main modes so I encourage you to do the same so I'm just going to zero out my camera coordinates and drag it back to get a little split view action happening I'm just going to select this button right here and for you it might just go into quads instead of like a two plan a two pane View and to change that just go up to this little um uh menu button on the top left go to layout and then select two panes and then that'll have this setup and in this viewport I'm in default and then on my left viewport I'm in cinematic and then I'm just going to select my C camera actor change it to a square aspect ratio so I have a bunch of favorites selected here so you can watch my 3D art project template video if you want to learn how to add favorites but really you just rightclick anything add to favorites so you can also type in aspect ratio and that'll come up so a square aspect ratio is just one and I'm going to go alt four here to get my lighting up and turn on my grid and now I'm just going to select the camera move it up a bit maybe there and then also change the focal length to 75 and then hit G on this guy so that we're not seeing the Grid on the Flor or anything and that should be pretty good for now actually so just like a classic uh Studio product shot and then disable that cool so we have our base camera set up and let me just move the light a little maybe that way or like point it at this guy just for now now the first thing we'll do is just check a couple project settings that will help you guys out or just make sure you have so just go to your edit project nope that's editor preferences go to edit project settings and then just type in Ray and then I just have my Hardware Ray tracing enabled the next thing I have is in my Ray lighting mode I have hit lighting for reflection so that'll be higher quality loom in Reflections and I've also got used Hardware tracing when available so those are just the main things I have selected and that you need to worry about for this and obviously I have Lumen enabled but that should be on by default and the next thing we want to do is also just make sure you have any of your plugins enabled like the motion design mode uh like that one and then the modeling mode as well modeling 1l the modeling tools editor mode just in case you need to edit things on your object or your product now the next thing obviously which is super important is our postprocess volume so go up to this menu go down to volumes and then find the postprocess volume and drag that guy in and I'm just going to zero out that Cor coordinate and move it behind us and if you want to figure out how I moved with my object like this so if you're moving it and then you hold shift you will move with that object so your camera will kind of be attached to it so really useful sometimes if you don't want to move around too much the first thing we'll do is as you can see I have a bit a few settings favored here but the first thing you want to do is type in infinite extent Unbound and then select that so it in uh in compasses our whole scene and any setting you see that I maybe don't mention where it is just type it in and it should be fine um the next thing I'll type in is exposure so I like to set my Min and Max EV to zero and then change my exposure compensation to zero as well that way we'll have no Auto exposure then I'll type in bloom and maybe leave that at zero as well and then lens flare so I'll just type in flare change that to zero for the lens flares so no lens flares and that should be it for the brightness settings and now the next settings we want to change are the Lumen ones so obviously our Global illumination our GI will be Lumen and our scene quality I'm just going to up that to two scene detail I'm going to also up that to four uh final gather quality will be two I'm also going to where is it scroll down scroll down oh yeah Reflections I'm going to change this it maxes out at two but I'm going to up it to four Ray lighting mode which should be the hit lighting Reflections that we just selected so it should all automatically be on hit lighting but just in case I'm going to put it here as well and high quality translucency in case you're using that and my Max reflection bounces I'm going to up to three and then refraction I'm going to leave it zero cuz I know I won't have any refraction but if you do you can up those as well well but those are the basic settings that I will be using for this and I could even up this up to like a three or four but it depends on your GPU so I'm just going to leave it at two for now and then we'll adjust it later if we need to all right so that's pretty much it for all the rambling and let me go back to my two pane View and let's begin lighting so I'm pretty much going to go for like a semi 3point lighting setup just one key light for a nice reflection on the bottle a soft fill light and then a light for the background so not like the standard three-point lighting method but good enough and you might be wondering why don't we just use an hdri so let me show you why so I'm just going to delete this rectangular light here and then go up to this menu go down to lights select Skylight and then let me zero it out here even though it doesn't matter and let me change this to from captured scene to specified Cube map which means we can put in our own custom hdri and then I'll just choose this basic Studio from Gray scale gorilla and you'll notice a bit of flickering here and for some reason especially on metallic objects the Skylight ends up being a bit noisy and if I rotate it around it just gets a little flickery and noisy and like the Shadows aren't very contrasty and it just doesn't look super clean all the time and it's hard to get a bit of art Direction with it you could still use it like there are some nice Reflections here and then you could dim it for like a bit of a fill light that could totally work but I just like using rectangular lights to really have full control over it I could even up the cubat resolution to 2K or something and that could help but yeah you could use this method who didn't mean to do that I set it to like two you could use this method but I just find it gets a bit noisy on like certain Metals especially really reflective things so I'm going to go for a rectangular light setup so deleting my Skylight again you can use it if you want to no shame in that going to delete my Skylight go to my unlit view in both of these viewports and I'm going to kind of use a Target lighting setup which is a method you might have seen or used in a lot uh in a bunch of other softwares when lighting so I'm going to go up to this menu go down to basic and then actor and I'm going to zero out the actor coordinates I might also zero out my product cuz it's kind of annoying how it's at 3.5 yeah so now my actor or kind of think of this as an empty null is at the center of my product I'm just going to move it up a bit so it's like roughly around the center and the next thing I'm going to do is grab a rectangular light boom and then zero that out as well so if I go back to LIT mode which is alt 4 you should have something that looks like this and if you want to follow along you could just model a cylinder and put a metal material on it and then use that as a placeholder for now so that could work now with this rectangular light before I move it or anything I'm actually going to make it a child of my actor my empty actor and now again keep the rotation the same and everything just move your rectangular light all the way out grab the actor and now go to rotate by the way I'm using we to cycle through the uh move rotate and scale tools you can also press space to cycle through them as well so I'm just using W and R to rotate through them so select your parent actor and now if you rotate it I'm just going to disable rotation snapping you can now kind of have a sort of Target light where you're using your null to rotate the light around so this can really help especially if you're animating and you want smooth light sweeps it also means your target light or your rectangular light is always going to be facing the the null and you don't have to worry about constantly rotating it and worrying about the angle of your light source to make sure it's correct one thing you'll notice me doing a lot is swapping between my world uh axis alignment and my local axis alignment which is just this guy right here so I'm going to as you can see if you hover over it it says control tilder to toggle between it so right now I'm just toggling between so I can kind of see what angle it's at and then I'll toggle back to world to rotate it maybe more to the right and then more to the left and then toggle it again to sort of get an idea of where my light is pointing and with that that also means you can select your rectangular light and swap to the local uh coordinates and then just like move this out if you'd like and then go back to your actor rotate it up a bit more and now you kind of have a bit of control and it might take a little while to get used to but I really think it's worth uh using this method when doing product lighting especially for this kind of shot now enough rambling uh let me select my light and I kind of want this to be a fill light so I'm going to make this a lot larger cuz larger lights have a softer Shadow and a softer fill whereas smaller lights create a harsher Shadow so as you can see if I make this eight and eight the shadow gets really sharp up on the right of the bottle like as you can see there and then if I make this 250 and 250 a lot softer so let me grab my actor I mean sorry my rectangular light move it out a bit and I want to make it a little higher maybe yeah something like that and then maybe make it a little smaller 150 could work and then get my actor again maybe move it it let me move it around see what I like so I think I just messed up the rotation let me reset it something like that yeah that could work and then I'm also going to change the temperature to 8,000 so something on the cooler side and also reduce the brightness to like a maybe a four that could work as a nice fill now I'm just going to rename this light to Phil and then I'll rename my actor to P for parent p light fill and we can even add this into a folder and I'll just call it 01 uncore lighting cool and then hit save now let's make another one so I'm just going to select I think I can just select the parent and hit contrl D nope so I select both of these guys hit contrl D to duplicate and I'm going to zero out the rotation and now this guy can be our main key light that has some Reflections on the left so I'm actually going to make this guy a bit smaller maybe just default so hit those buttons bring it in a little bit like that and then rotate rotate it up maybe something like that could work could try to highlight the the text as well I don't want to use Too Many Lights though for this so I just want to keep that in in mind and maybe that works quite well I might make it even smaller on the height maybe 30 and then rotate it up a bit and then rotate it around just to get that nice like highlight on the left and we still do need to get the text kind of showing and that could just be a camera angle thing because the angle of our camera doesn't allow for for this uh Studio to reflect onto our bottle super nicely so you can see if I move it up the angle of reflection hits our text better I don't even know if that made sense I might rotate our camera down a touch maybe even like a minus8 and then go to our camera and move it up a bit something like that looks really good there we go so now we're getting full nice white reflection on our bottle cuz you can see depending on the Ang of our camera we all have different Reflections because it's a chrome thing physics and all that um and I'm actually going to rename this guy to key and then change the N to key as well and I might make it brighter like a eight yeah something like that's really nice and you might notice on my background I've got a bit of a nor like a bump map to it I've just used a normal and what I've done is you can just go find any any texture online like go to ambient or CG textures.com and you can type in paper or something and just grab like you know the bump map or normal map from paper and then apply it onto a basic white object to get a nice bit of texture on your studio setup cool so I'm really happy with this turns out yeah just changing the angle does a lot of work for us I might rotate my key light parent a little more I don't like how the Shadows casting kind of forward so I'm just going to go back to World maybe do a little more something like that might dim the fill light a bit more to like a two to get a bit more contrast in my Shadows yep that looks good rotate it attad maybe make it a bit wider 100 and then rotate it again that should be pretty good yeah and now the last Light I want to add personally is just a background light so I'm just going to remember to save go back to this top menu lights rectangular light I know I'm kind of jumping around a lot but that's sort of how I am with lighting anyways I'm just like playing around with angles seeing what you know Reflections and locations work the best so for our background light we I'm not going to use an active Target thing for this just cuz it's super simple just going to drag it up rotate it down a bit maybe also scale in the attenuation radius which is this guy right here you can use the scale tool to bring it in yeah that should be nice and then I just got to change the temperature to 8,000 and let me drag it up around there just to create a bit of separation and like a smoothness to the background so now if I turn it on and off you can see it kind of adds almost like a bit of a rim light as well it's personal preference here I kind of like it just might make it a bit Yeah a bit dimmer yeah that's good just fills out that background a little more something like that should work cool and I'm just going to rename it to BG for background hit save and now what we can also do is go to our postprocess volume and I'm now going to turn my Bloom back on drag this guy this window a little make it a little bigger and again you can see now that we've added a few rectangular lights a lot of the noise has gone too so that's a big positive of using these again not completely sure why I want to say the Skylight is just an emissive Dome causing a lot of noise whereas the rectangular lights are calculated differently because I get similar results if I'm using an emissive light source instead of a rectangular light If someone knows in the comments please let me know would love to learn more about that um and anyway back to the bloom I found setting it at like a two worked quite nice gave a bit of softness to it so if I turn it off and on gave a bit of softness to it and you can up the threshold if you would like or like max out the bloom and then play with your threshold to see where you want your highlights to be selected and then reduce it back down so if I toggle this on and off it just gives a bit of softness around the highlights and then I'm going to select this viewport and hit f11 to see how it looks and I'm pretty happy with that so now we can kind of start adding extra camera angles and see how we can get this to look nice so get this camera I'm going to select it and call it camore Center for the like middle and then 75 mil and then I'm going to contrl D also sorry one thing I just forgot you might have noticed that there's no depth of field here and that's because I have it turned off actually so I should have set this in the beginning but the main two console variables I have is okay so by default your depth of field will look like this you can select your camera and then select your object and it'll be in Focus but for some of these shots I don't actually want any depth of field or if I do I want to add it on later so what you can do is go to your console command here and a shortcut to that is just pressing the tilder key and then type r. depth of field and then you can use the arrows to go up depth of field quality so again by default this is four but what you can do is just type zero and that disables the depth of field all together so you can see if I go to my um camera changing the focus distance does nothing another thing that I want to tell you about is go back to your console variable and type r. rracing doing and then change this to zero so that'll make sure your shadows are always being traced and if your camera is really far away your shadows will not cut out so definitely not a performance enhancing um console variable but definitely good for cinematics and offline rendering kind of stuff cool so again I've just duplicated my camera up here and now I'm going to let's try 50 mil so I'll leave it in the center just rename it to 50 and then actually change our focal length to 50 and we just actually need to change our viewport to the 50 and maybe you know you want to Let's Zer out the rotation see how that looks maybe bring it in a bit closer rotate it down move it up a bit that could give another cool look a bit more of like a top down angle versus that and also getting a little more shape to the cylinder because it is a slightly wider focal length so that could work really nicely let's duplicate the 75 again and then I'm going to call this cam close uh I'll call it close one cuz I'll probably have a few of them and then let's pilot our close one and then move around maybe sorry I'm just moving it around let's see something like that could be could be quite nice or maybe something there could be quite nice yeah something like that could work and then again you just duplicate another one you pilot it just rename it so you don't forget close to and then let's try make this I don't know like a 35 mil closeup could be something fun 35 and then you could maybe make it something like that or come down a bit something like that could work nicely play around again you could use the grid the grids or the rule of thirds to frame up a shot and then now you've got a few different camera setups and you can just select all of them sorry let me rename this 35 mil you can select all of them press the folder button to put them in a folder and then I'll call this 02 cameras and now let me just go back to my 75 so that's pretty much the first Studio setup the next setups I'll show you hopefully are a bit quicker but this is kind of the main base setup that I like to keep and I got to remember to take my vitamins that's not any other kind of pill um all right let's move on to the next setup [Music] so a good way to organize these different lighting setups is using a level as a container for all these lighting scenarios and then what you can do is turn different levels on and off so you could have the studio setup you could have dark Moody contrasty lighting setup and I'll show you how to do that right now so go to the folder in your content browser where you've saved your main level which is this guy tutorial forgo body wash and then right click make a new folder and call it sub levels and right now all of these things that we've just made are located or they exist in this level right here but what we kind of want is we want to have different levels with different lighting scenarios but we want to keep our maybe we want to keep our product in the same spot we want our cameras to stay the same but we just want the lights to be able to be turned on and off and easily organized so what we can do is go to Su levels right click create a new level and call it I like to call mine SL for suble and then I'll have some identifier for this project or for this scene that we're working on so I'll call it forgo cuz that's the name of the brand of this body wash and then I'll call it Studio lighting and what we can do with that is now go to your window and then find this levels thing and check it on and I've just docked it here so it might just come out like this and then I'm just going to drag it onto here and and then save all grab this empty level that we've just made and drag it into this window so now this will be the container of all our studio lighting setups and the main level which is the persistent level will host I'm going to leave our cameras in this level and I'm going to leave our product in this level and then later on we'll use the sequencer to organize all of them and what we can do now is make sure everything that you want to move is showing so not hidden like this and then we can just twirl these guys down select all of them and then we can select our background because this is also part of the studio setup and we're going to leave behind our cameras and our product and our postprocess volume cuz those are going to be constants between each level at least for me you might have different postprocess settings and then you can also make that on a per level basis so I know this might not make sense right now but what you can do is have your object selected that you want to move right click your suble and then move selected actors to level and then that's done and now what we can do is turn this off and on and this pretty much is the container for all of our studio setup so if I go to unlp mode and turn this off you can see our cameras and our postprocess volume stay here cuz they're in the persistent level and when this is checked on they are going to be in this streaming level or this sub level underneath it now one thing to notice see how this is bold that is because I'm currently in the persistent level but say I double click this and now I you know make a sphere or something or add it into the scene and let me zero it out now I've made this sphere because I have double clicked this level and now I'm inside it as you can see here the level I'm in is my studio lighting this sphere now belongs in this level because that's the level I'm in so just make sure if you're making things you're keeping track of where stuff is so now for example if I hide this and I'm like wait where did my sphere go I need to go back into it select my sphere and then change or move selected actors to level turn this off now this exists in my persistence so just keep that in mind you want to have all your main geometry and uh constant variables in your persistent and then any Dynamic variables like your light setups and cameras possibly can go into your Su levels now we can actually move on to the next scene I know I've been explaining a lot of things at once so definitely rewatch it if it's confusing or please let me know in the comments if I missed something or was too quick happy to answer anything and this next setup will be a bit more of like a darker Moody lighting setup and funnily enough we're actually going to use an hdri for this because I found with more contrasty hdris that have a bit more darker spots and higher highlights it doesn't get too noisy so I'll just show you what I've done for this setup so what we're going to do is go up to this menu and again in our levels window I have our studio lighting turned off and what actually we can do is right click create a new level slore forgo underscore I'm just going to call it Moody and then drag this in and now I'm going to be I'm going to double click our Moody suble level so that we're in that and that way all these lights I add it's just going to be one but the light I add will exist in this level so plus menu down to lights Skylight I'm just going to make sure we're on in the source type from captured scene to specified Cube map and what you can do is I've just downloaded a few hdris I have this grayscale gorilla one which is like has a lot of dark spots and a few a bunch of like soft highlights as well spread throughout the image and what you can do is just go to poly Haven and they have again all the best like free HD super high quality you can just go to any of the nighttime ones maybe and then even artificial lighting and like pick like a really high contrasty one like satara Knight is good um what's another good one let me go back to night this one could be really good uh this fireplace one could have some nice warm contrasty lighting this could be a good one too Blue Lagoon KN so anything that's like dark high contrasty should work quite well even in the studio setups if you can find a primarily dark one like this studio small one could work well I'll just be a bit worried about the white uh flooring anyway let's go back to Unreal so I'm just going to press alt four to go to lip mode select our Skylight and then let me drag this guy in and you can see a little bit of showing up here let me up the cube map resolution to 4K this could make your scene lag quite a lot so if this is too laggy just go down to 2048 or 1024 but because my product is pretty reflective I'm going to go up to 4K because I kind of need those Reflections to look crisp and let me rotate it a bit see if we can get anything to show up and I might just yeah Okay cool so we it looks like if our camera is lower we'll be able to get some cool streaky um light Reflections happening and I might up the intensity to like a two or three yeah three could be quite nice and this is where I might also make a new camera so let me get the cam close one duplicate it with contrl d and then I'm actually going to probably leave it at 75 but also change it to cam under cuz I want a camera view underneath our product because we don't have any background anymore so I'm going to select to my actually I'll go to my other view go to cam under there we go maybe kind of move underneath it a bit something like that this could honestly be a cam close three so I'm actually going to call this close three so this could be a cool shot especially if I move it something like that maybe yeah maybe something there could be quite nice let me try to up the focal length a bit like a 150 really make it flat and like take up the whole screen a bit more let me rotate the lights again uh this guy the angle I kind of liked it when there was a bit more color yeah okay so yeah we got like the nice warm light coming through yeah something like that could work really well and then let me again duplicate this guy make sure I rename it to 150 duplicate it and I'm going to make this one like a full frame underneath the object change it back to a 75 75 let me pilot that guy something like this could work really well so if I turn my grid on I don't know why oh it just left default let me go back to cinematic view get my grid up yeah so maybe something like that could work now the only problem with this is the bottom of our object is like almost completely pitched black so this is where I'm just going to grab a rectangular light let me save all I'm going to grab a rectangular light drag it into the scene zero out the coordinates don't know why this got so big let me drag this window out a bit there we go so we get our arrows so we have our rectangular light here I'm just going to rotate it sorry turn my snapping on rotate at 90 drag it down let me move move my camera out a little more also if you're wondering how I'm speeding up and slowing down my camera speed um you'll notice here in the top right it says camera speed 0.059 while I'm holding right click and moving if I scroll down it slows it down and if I scroll up it speeds up so while moving just use your scroll wheel up and down to change the camera speed so super useful for doing like detail shots as well now I'm going to get my rectangular light and actually make it smaller maybe like a 10 and 10 and these barn doors around it are quite distracting so I'm going to change the bar door length to one just so it doesn't look super big and now what I can do is just move it around until we get like a nice fall off maybe drag it up a bit just move it around till we get something nice we could scale down or our attenuation radius as well maybe again move it up up do something like that let me see how that looks turn our grid off yeah pretty happy with that pretty happy with that kind of want a bit more I want it to be brighter like a 20 let's see where this is and then let me play with it yeah something like that like I want kind of a harsh gradient fall off so I'm just moving it in this x and y axis and you could imagine like you could animate the the rotation of these lights and just get more of like a darker Moody lighting and then you can also maybe model a plane for the background and get like a soft background for it if you'd like or just render it out with a transparent background and then add it in post and then you can put some text behind it something like that could work really well and if you want to learn how to do that check out my render passes video where I show you how to render out all those different kinds of uh outputs and let's just check what is in our scene so if I turn this off our cameras also get taken with like they're also in this scene so I'm actually just going to get these guys move selected actors to level cool so now it's just my lights and I've noticed that I think my folder my lighting folder oh there we go it's back so for some reason my folder disappeared my lighting folder so I'm just going to change my lights drag it into that rename this under bottle not sure what to name it and boom go to my undercool and that's my hdri and that is it for our Moody lighting Vibe let's move on to the next [Music] one okay so this next section is going to be all about gobo lighting so we're going to do static Gobo light and then I'm going to show you how to make an animated one and a few other little controls that help fine-tune the look of your goo so I'm just quickly going to make a new suble call it slore I'm going to call it tiles because I'm about to paste in some geometry that I modeled before and it'll be really simple so drag in my SL tiles oh I named it incorrectly SL foro tiles nope still got it wrong what's wrong with me turn off my Moody scene and if I just hit contrl V by the way you can contrl C and contrl V like copy paste things from other levels so all this is a couple planes like three planes and a box and I just have a tile the ivory zel zelig tile material from quixel Mega scans and I've just applied some displacement to it if you want to learn how to do that check out my tutorial on how to make Mega scans assets have displacement and also make them try planer so that's a fun video I think Super useful as well so this is going to be my scene for the Gobo setup and let me just go to unlit mode Let's first talk about how to set up a static Gobo so if I go to my assets folder where my Goos are I have a bunch of different Goos imported and these are also just some radial gradients that I made in Photoshop like the bare basic Bare Bones one so definitely download anything free online that you can find or just make your own in Photoshop to follow along uh I've downloaded a a bunch of these from grayscale gorilla cuz they have really good assets for this kind of stuff and to make a goo also shout out wi Bush he just made a tutorial on this as well is you want to make a material that you can see here called a light function material so let me just do a new one here I'm going to create a new folder tutorial right click make a material and I'm going to call this light function master and and then double click it and then on the left here in the I want to say shading model we want to nope in the material domain we want to change it from surface to light function so that'll only give us the emissive color input and then within this space I'm just going to make this window a bit smaller close my hdri and let me just drag in a gobo texture that I have so what's a cool one let me see yeah I'll just do the plant this can be our default Gobo but we'll be able to change it in our material instance later so I'm going to right click this convert to parameter and I'm going to call this goo input or Gobo map maybe drag out of this and create a cheap contrast so this will allow us to change the contrast of our Gobo which can be really good if you want more harsher Shadows or softer shadows and you can play with it a bit more so let's connect this to a cheap contrast hold s and click type contrast and then the default value if you hover over it is zero so I'm going to leave this at zero drag that into there drag that into emissive color and you can see it's kind of already projecting it and then the next thing we actually care about is controlling the UV so that way we can pan our map if we need to so right click type in MF tiling and then select any of those and hit enter and then just plug the result into the UVS and you should have this node if you've imported any quick Mega scans materials because it creates this material function that lets you control the tiling of a texture and the panning and offset of a texture and then we just want to hit apply and save and now I'm going to go into our scene go back to lip mode Let's drag in a light a rectangular light into the scene these cameras are a bit annoying I'm just going to hide them here but they will still work so don't worry about it now let's just leave our rectangular light there let me also check what camera is good so go back to LIT mode in our left view maybe the center one sorry not the close Center 50 could be good for now let's try that or actually you know what let me make another camera so I'm going to duplicate my 75 and then let me pilot it it's right there so let me change this instead of Center I'll just call it angle and then delete the two I'll zero out the rotation and and drag it down a bit and then also drag it to the left and maybe just rotate it let me just pilot it here for now so I'll do something like this for the camera angle so we get a bit of depth in the scene as well and again let me just make sure the rotation is zeroed out on that drag it down minus 30 cuz I like whole numbers so that should be good for our camera angle let me save all and then let me go back to our light function material Master right click create material instance and I'll call this LF uncore well let's make this a plant Gobo so I'll call it plant 01 and then in our light if you select it you can scroll down until you find this light function setting and then just drag the light function in there why is that not working oh it is working sorry the tiling is just off if I make it 20 and 20 Okay cool so I've just changed the tiling to 20 and 20 and then what you can do is oh my I was so worried there that it wasn't working let me turn down the brightness of this as well so I've just favored the intensity and then I've also favored a few other settings here so let me change this to like a one or a three maybe yep open that up again let me change the offset of the Y and the X and you'll see it's dragging you see it's like dragging or stretching along the surface cuz our light is perfectly at 90° so I'm just going to turn off my snapping and then just rotate it so it's a bit more of like a 45° angle and then drag it up maybe something like that now the next thing maybe a bit more that way yeah now the next thing that you might be wondering is you don't want the tiling you just kind of want this the singular Shadow uh coming through the light function material so to do that um what we want to do is I think I'm using let me check search for the texture sorry yes so I'm using that Gobo at the moment because I don't want to edit the original I'm just going to hit contrl D to duplicate and then change it to 10 underscore no tile going to double click this guy open up our texture we can close our Master material so open up the texture and then in the search panel if you just search for wrap so they'll have this tiling method what we can do is change this to clamp so what this means is it will not tile the texture in the X and Y but you can choose which side or which direction you prefer to do that and then hit save and now we just want to go into our light function material and swap out this for the no tile now don't freak out they're currently we we just got to pan it around till we find it but what because of how the Anchor Point is used for this panning if you just set the offset X to 0.5 and the offset y to.5 that will make sure the Gobo mask is in the center of our rectangle so what that means is if I just up this tiling to 20 and 20 you'll see now that the center of our rectangle is where the Gobo is being projected so if I put it back to zero and zero it like is anchored to the top right of our light so if we just go 0. five that'll be the middle of our light on the x axis and then 0 five in the Y the middle of our light in the Y AIS so and then let me just make it a little biger so maybe 15 and 15 something like that could work you kind of just place it there and let me again move my camera up a little bit just so the floor is reflecting a bit more on on our bottle hit save and because this is kind of meant to be like a sunlight thing I'm just going to reduce the temperature to make it a bit warmer to maybe like a 5,000 and then make it a bit brighter maybe five yeah that could work and then what we can also do do is if you want a sharper Shadow you can just increase the contrast to make it something like that or if you want a lighter Shadow or a softer Shadow you could go into the negative a bit so I'm just going to leave mine on default cuz I like the way it looks and then it looks like they've added some extra functionality here so let me check out these so oh you can change the scale so you can change the scale of it here instead of the tiling in the light function so that's pretty cool and then the fade distance I'm assuming is yeah the maximum distance that the Gobo affects the scene so you could like fade it in there which could be cool if you have a different kind of tiling Gobo that you want to fade in and out so I'll just leave that on default and we can keep that like that maybe I'll also just bring the bors in so that the rest of the image isn't so bright so let me just change the angle like that and then make the Barn Door length a bit longer so that it's not spreading to the rest of the scene so much and I even might make the light a bit smaller so like a 30 and 30 and then Up the Barn Door angle a bit change the length could be something like that which could work really well and then after you've done that you could maybe add like a fill light so I'm just going to add another light rectangular you'll see this it'll have this overlapping Shadows eror so just make sure all your lights are movable and you can also go into your other Su levels and do the same thing so again just make sure your lights are movable going to drag them into my lighting folder so I can use this sky as like a fill light I'm just going to turn on my rotation snap with a shortcut or you can click this here I've just changed my shortcut to alt e to toggle snapping on and off you can do that in your editor preferences by the way if you want to add custom some key binding so I'll just type in rotation snap and I've made mine alt e so then just drag this guy down or rotate it down drag him up let's see what it looks like with maybe a two and then let's also change the temperature to maybe like an 8,000 or like let's go warm as well that could work maybe just a 7,000 like a cooler light sort of to act like a Skylight and then let's also up the size so it's a bit of a softer F and [Music] then you could have like a pretty bright ambient light scene and then we could increase the brightness of this as well to kind of get that overblown sunlight look so that's pretty much how you do a static Gobo light now let's also add in another type of animated Gobo and set that up up with animated cor sticks cuz I think this is a fun one to do you're going to need to download an animated Gobo so I'm assuming you've already done that whether it's an image sequence that you've made an after effects or Da Vinci resolve or you've downloaded it from grayscale gorilla or online somewhere for free so get your animated Gobo in your PC somewhere as an image sequence and then once you have that you can create a new folder or something called animated I'm just going to add tutorial just so I don't forget and then in this uh folder right click go to media and then go to image media source and then go find your Gobo material or your image sequence I'm just going to call it IMS for image media Source underscore cor sticks goo double click it and then find your sequence path so this is my sequence path I'm just going to select the first one and hit open and once you've done that you can with this selected right click media I don't know if you need it selected by the way but right click media media player and then check video output media texture asset cuz we need a texture asset that is pretty much our animated Gobo so we want that and we want to link it together so hit okay I'm going to call this mpcore for media player uncore cor sticks Gobo and that'll make this guy so if I double click this ignore all these guys here I'm going to select my IMS costi Gobo and now that is our Gobo texture playing and looping and we just want to make sure we have Loop checked on so it keeps looping and then save you also have some other options here with the uh size and rotation so you can play with that and also on shuffle so you might have a random map that you want to start at a random value so you can always turn on shuffle and then hit save all now I'm going to use a separate rectangular light for this guy so just going to drag in a new one drag him into the scene make sure it's set to movable going to rotate him 40° and up and go back to my tutorial folder and create a new material instance call it LF cor sticks animated and then in this goo map texture I'm going to plug in the media texture so right now now it might not make sense but when we do the thing it should work okay so one and one and then let's hit save get our cor sticks on our rectangular light and drag it on this guy cool and now we've got some cor sticks which is great it's not animated yet I'll show you how to do that in a second so I'm just going to change the tiling to maybe three and three yeah that looks pretty good and now what we want to do to get it playing we actually need to use a sequence so I'm just going to make a new sequence folder within my fer I'll just call it tutorial and I'll create a new level sequence so I'll call it lsor forg goore goo and first thing I'm going to do is drag in my camera so we have a camera track and the next thing I will do is go to add and then do media track here from the media Source I'm going to do the IMs Co sticks goo that we made earlier again ignore these these are some other ones I haven't scen so IMS cotic goo and then still not playing because we'll need to right click this go to properties and then in the media texture MP cor sticks Gobo video that we made before and you might have another other few ones here but just remember what name you called it before cool and now now if we go to the beginning you'll see it moving and if you feel like it's a little too fast you can change the tiling going to drag this in I'll call this light goo cor sticks and I think this one was goo plant and then this was just a fill light so the cor sticks one I'm just going to up the tiling a little more maybe five and five could be good and then let me extend this play to 300 I'm just hitting the right square bracket to change my out point and then I'm just going to drag my camera cut track Beyond those extents and then also drag this guy to the whole amount cool and now we have some Co sticks moving and we can also change the temperature of it I'll make it warmer 4500 maybe and then we have our fill light which is way too bright now so let me maybe yeah like a one and I'll make the temperature slightly warm and then we have our Gobo plant which we can now also tweak cool so now we've got a few Goos layered on and then if you want to you know add a bit more realism you can then add some camera shaking or something you might not have this but this is a really good pack to have for natural camera movement and then if I just change it to like a 0.1 full screen this guy and hit play now we've got a bit of a subtle camera shake and we've got some Goos working not the best lighting I'll definitely play around with this and you'll see what it looks like in the final animation but that's just how you get a few different Gobo setups animated and static as well as being able to control the contrast of it and just fine-tune it a bit more so hopefully that was cool and useful and let's move on to the next scenario okay so this next one is a bit more simpler but kind of covers spotlights as well as interior lighting in a way or like a detail to spotlights and let me just make another camera to show you an example of what I mean and also just a new camera that will show this type of lighting a bit better so let me I just copied or duplicated my 50 mil and again remember to keep all your geometry organized by level so just keep making new suble levels and use them as containers for your objects that will kind of be toggled on and off so this is just going to be my duplicated 50 mil except I'm just going to drag it out a little more so I'm just going to zero out the rotation where is it this guy and then drag it down a bit and then maybe Center it so zero on the Y cool and I'm also just going to hide these guys for now let me just drag in a spotlight drag this guy in um let me make the angle more like a 25 24 drag it over the top maybe even less and I can also make the attenuation radius I can just scale it in something like that around there cool so you can see this is like just a basic Spotlight and The Cone is very uniform whereas in real life and this is kind of what I learned back in my architectural rendering days which is like how I started in 3D rendering is a lot of lights in interiors and houses have different kind of Shadows and profiles of how they hit the wall like they don't just have a straight cone some of them do some of them don't so you'll notice here um those shapes are called IES profiles or at least the file type is when trying to do that in where a lot of lights will have different ways that they emit light from the globe and have different kinds of patterns so what we can do is use these patterns in our spotlights or any scene in any renderer use to kind of give a bit more of like a realistic lighting scenario of how a down light from a ceiling or anything like that or a lamp would actually hit the wall so this uh website right here so good IES library.com have a bunch of I files up for free so you can just download any one of these that you like I think I've downloaded this guy here and this one uh and then we can kind of import them into unreal and then use them so if I go to my Gobo folder I want to say is it yes I have a few IES uh profiles down here so all you do is just download that file and then drag it into unreal and with your Spotlight selected if you scroll down to light profile it's looking for an i texture which is this pink one right here and then if I drag that on you'll notice and I'll go to Just number four if I let me just spread the attenuation I mean spread make the outer cone angle a bit bigger and then maybe play with ah there we go once it's close enough to the wall you'll notice it actually has a different way of Shining Light onto the wall you just got to make sure your light is actually close enough to get that effect and you can see here this yellow um kind of wireframe is the outline of like the the main highlight or the main light source of this Spotlight so this just is a lot more realistic looking and if I just zoom out even more you can kind of see it has like a nice inner fall off and outer fall off of where the bright levels are and then this is another texture so if I just drag this on this is a different kind of Spotlight which is a lot more thin and long and kind of a bit more focused in and you can really get different details and falloffs of brightness intensity on your light so definitely play around with IES profiles to get different looks in your scene so you could use this to you know highlight your subject here or act as a cool backlight for the fill of the background and then what you can do is just grab a few other lights or even just duplicate this one so I'm just going to duplicate it again make sure it's movable because you will have overlapping Shadow so just select your light to make a movable I could drag this guy here is it yep and then make the attenuation radius a bit bigger rotate it you could get a sort of look there for the back wall I'm just looking on the left here and then you could alt and drag it copy it again get another one kind of like there or something and that way you can just create really interesting shadows and lighting without too much work just using an IES profile so definitely check that out I will link the website down below and let's move on to the final scene before we start organizing everything okay so for our final lighting setup it'll be an outdoor sunlight kind of style so I've just made a new blank sublevel called slor sunlight and I've renamed it or named it incorrectly again so slore forg goore sunlight and then I've just made it a suble of our persistent and I've also if I just hit contrl +v made some geometry again the same thing just a different Mega scans material on this plane here and then I've added a few of the broken cinder blocks also from Mega scans so no lights in this scene yet but what we will do again a very simple setup I'm just going to go up to my plus menu go to lights and then drag in a directional light so let me also just pick a camera so I'm going to do yeah we could do the 50 cool and then I'm just going to select my sub or my object and hit F to fly to it or focus in on it and let me just play around with the angle of the sunlight so usually for a sunlight you kind of want some nice Shadows that are a bit contrasty and then we can pick and choose whether we want it to be harsh or soft so for now we could just do something like this and this is also a time where we can position our object using a an empty actor kind of like how we used the empty actors for our rectangular lights earlier so let me just grab a basic actor I'm going to call this P for parore bottle and then I'll call it underscore sunlight just because I know it's for the sunlight and because I don't want to change the I don't want to move our product at the moment because it's also being used in a bunch of other levels I'm going to create a sequence to position our our bottle just only for this level and so it doesn't happen in every other level so we can just key frame it and use it for this level so I'll call this lsor for goore sunlight I know I might be saying a lot of things that don't make sense but hopefully they do once you actually see me do them so first let me position our empty actor in the right spot so I'll zero out the coordinates I'm going to press alt H I think yeah alt H to go into the top oh no that's front view Alt J to go into the top view it's a bit hard to see right now yeah there we go but essentially I want this to be on the edge of our bottle and you'll see why in a second maybe I want it to be this back Edge no this this is the back Edge cool I'm just looking on the left to see where it is and I think 3.5 is the actual edge of the bottle because it is a 7 cm diameter yeah cool so now our actor is placed Here and Now what we can do is drag our product on top of the actor and the reason we can't is because this actor right now is in our sunlight level and it needs to be in the same level if we want to attach things to different actors and parents so what I'll do is I'll right click move our actor to the persistent level and now drag our product on top of it and what I can do is drag this parent actor into our sequence hit the plus and then transform and then add a key frame so now we have a key frame for where this actor is and it won't mess up in our other scenes so I'm going to do I kind of want my bottle to be lying down in between these two cinder blocks so I'm just going to move this here and then and drag it down maybe move it out a bit Yeah somewhere there drag it down and I'm just switching back and forth between my local and World axis pressing alt two to go to wireframe and let me move it a bit this way cool and again do not do anything in your sequencer cuz once you move this thing this uh play head it'll reset its key frame so before you do anything make sure you hit the Plus on the key frame to replace what we made before so now if we do that it doesn't move or anything and if you do want auto key framing on you can just select this guy here but I prefer to do this method when just doing simple stuff like this so if I go back to alt four that pretty that looks pretty good like it's lying down and now we just need to create a new camera so let me duplicate the 75 maybe yeah I'll duplicate angle 75 and I'll just call it underscore sunlight just so I know it's for my sunlight one I'll even drag that into the sequencer as well so I'll just pilot it by clicking this button here and let me make this bigger move into a good position I think something like that could work for this yeah that looks pretty good and then we just have to play with the lighting now so let me move around my sunlight a bit a bit something like that could work for sure and if you have your directional lights selected you can play with the Source angle to get a more softer sunlight or you can drag it down to get super harsh light just depends the it depends on the vibe that you're after or the aesthetic and it's a little bright so I might change it down to like a seven yeah that looks good and again this has no ambient fill lighting right now because we all we're using is the directional light and I'm just going to change it to movable now the next thing we might want to add is a skylight if you do want some ambient light in there so all you got to do kind of what we did before go to the plus menu light Skylight and then drag this window up and go down to my hdri folder and then I'll just drag in this sunny beach one that I downloaded from poly Haven for free change our Skylight from captured scene to specified Cube map press this button to put it in now we've got some nice Reflections happening of the sky as if this was an outdoor scene and I'm also going to up my resolution to 4K hit save and I might just lower the intensity to like A5 maybe .7 yeah that works and then let me go to our directional light might rate it a little bit and then also rotate my Skylight just to have a few more Reflections in there cool and then I might rotate the sunlight to be there and now I can up the intensity a bit and here you can kind of tell it has a little more of like a softer lighting feel so that's where we can up the source angle to get some softer Shadows but again if you just turn off your Skylight you can also go for this high contrast look as well so it's just playing around with these two um lighting setups to see what works best for you I think I kind of like that sort of midday feel like this now the only thing that I think we need to add is maybe a bit more contrast the outer areas just look so plain and a little washed out in my opinion so what we can do is by the way if it saves and resets you can just move this and if that doesn't work just hit save and now it'll like recalculate this key frame and make sure it's in the right spot so what we can do is just add some blocking geometry to give some Shadows into our scene so what we can do is just go to this plus menu shapes Cube and then let me scale this down and then scale it down in that direction as well drag it up and you'll see in a sec what we're doing maybe there and you can see the Shadows that it casts so if I just move this way up and then drag it maybe there I'll make it a little wider rotate it this way maybe and then just drag it here I feel like our Sun's a little too soft I'm just going to set it back yeah that's better drag it and then I'm going to hold alt and drag and then alt and drag again just to get a little more cont contrast and dynamic elements in our shadows and you could like animate these and move these around just to create a bit more depth in the scene and also what you can do at the moment these pieces of geometry would actually be contributing to the lighting of our scene so if you don't want that you can make a light blocker material so let me find it m light blocker so all I've done is made a blank material and just put zero in the base color metallic and specular one in the roughness and we even need this guy so that way it's completely rough and it doesn't reflect or absorb any light so hit yes and then you can just drag that material onto these guys and you can see they don't add anything to the scene so you won't have to worry about weird GI contributing to your scene and stuff like that so that's pretty much the outdoor lighting setup and again remember to make sure to put everything in your sunlight level so I'm just going to turn this off and then I think I just got to put these guys in the level right click move selected actors to level save all cool and now we've got this sunlight level and if I go to our first camera that we made we've got our tiles level and I'm just going to close out that sequence so that we have it the first camera was this one we've got this guy um we've got our studio lighting setup and we've got our Moody lighting setup which was utilizing this kind of camera angle so we've got everything everything organized into our Su levels and now I'm just going to show you how to organize it all in a sequencer so you don't have to manually check it on and off okay so I'm going to start with the studio lighting setup and to make sure we have everything showing that we want uh that sentence didn't make sense let's just go to your sequence folder right click create cinematic sequence level sequence and we're kind of going to do what we did for the others so I'm going to go lsor Studio no sorry forg goore Studio cuz this is the studio scene double click it and drag in any cameras that you want to use in this scene you could drag all of them in but for example I'm just going to do the center 75 and then I'm also going to do the close two and close three maybe okay not the close three because that was for a different level close one yeah so I've got three cameras in this scene that I want to use and to make sure this sequence shows the right level when we are playing it we just want to go to this ad menu and then go to where is it level I'm blind level visibility track and then it'll have this visible Channel and then if you go to the plus we can make a hidden channel so for the visible we just want the studio lighting to be visible and then we want these three guys if I just double click my persistent we want these three three guys so the sunlight tiles and the Moody to be hidden so that means whenever we load this sequence we will have the correct level setup as well and you could make this uh you could split up this camera cut track so maybe for the first 30 frames I want the 75 mil and then for the next few frames I want the close one angle and then from frame 90 to frame 150 I want the close to angle so if I now select the camera cut viewport it'll now Cy between these three so that's how you'll get all your different camera angles in the right one so now let's set up one of the other ones let's do it for the Gobo cuz we already have a setup here so you can see we don't have the correct level showing so what we'll do is I'm going to turn off my studio turn on the tiles cuz that's what we had and then I'm going to go add level visibility add a hidden Channel put my tiles in the visible and put these three in the hidden and hit save and another thing you can do cuz remember we had the IES setup we had the spotlight setup and we had the Gobo setup so to control that as well let's say we want this sequence to be the Gobo sequence so I'm going to select all my Gobo related lights drag them in and they can stay on and then we can animate stuff if we need to and then I'm going to drag my IES lights which we don't want showing drag those guys in and I'm just going to add a actor hidden in game and then uncheck that so now that won't work and then we can do the same for these two and if you want to do it a bit quicker you can just select that visibility track hit contrl C to copy select the next one crl +v paste control V paste and that'll quickly do the same thing so that means whenever I load this sequence it will and then I just go to my camera cut it'll load this shot here and we can hit save and then what we can do is Select this sequence I know I'm talking a lot right now but just follow along contrl D and then instead of Gobo I'll call this is and then we kind of want to do the opposite so turn on our IES lights and then turn off these lights so again act a hidden ingame turn it off so no visibility contrl c contrl v control V and then in this we also don't need the media player because we're not going to have our Goos and then maybe for this uh scene we don't like the 75 mil cam we can use the I think it was 50 mil to yeah we can use this and then just make sure your camera cut track is referencing this camera and to do that it'll show you if it's not it'll say object is missing right click cam Center 50 mil2 so now whenever we're in this track we will see this camera view and if you want to further organize it I can select these three lights right click move to folder new folder and then I'll just call this off so I usually have an off folder so whatever's off or hidden I'll just drag it into there and then I don't think unfortunately you can't add like a visibility track to the parent folder I wish you could but everything in it I'll just have it turned off and now I just know these are the things I need to worry about and I've got my correct level showing and again uh if we go to I guess sunlight yeah we can do sunlight add level visibility make a hidden one turn off our tiles turn on sunlight drag our sunlight to visible and then drag our three hidden ones onto hidden go to our camera cut we've already got the correct camera there and then you can key frame your Skylight or your sunlight and to be in the position you want it to be in and then finally our last one which will be for the Moody one LS foro Moody and add camera cut track I already oh no not camera cut level visibility make a hidden one turn on my Moody level turn off these three drag it into hidden turn on this guy drag it into the visible and then I know it's under and close three that I care about so close three so let's say halfway through at frame 75 I want it to show my other camera shot so now you can see here we will get both of them and we can hit save so now we've got the correct levels as well and we've got the correct thing showing in our outliner and then what you can do is right click cinematics I'll call it lsor forg goore master and then if you want you can put like 00 to make it the front now what we can do is open up that Master sequence and drag in all of our other ones so like this can I just drag it in I can I don't think I like that method like the shot method so what I'll do is I'll add subsequence track and then drag in this guy zoom out I'm holding control to zoom out and see more of the timeline and then I think I can just drag all of them in now like that yep so I'll just do I'll just organize it like this cool so now if we then add a camera cut track so we can look through the cameras you can see we have we have our Gobo scene we have our IES scene our Moody scene we have our uh Studio lighting scene and then we have our sunlight scene and and then you can just render this ma Master sequence out in your movie render que and you're good to go so that's pretty much it for all the lighting setups how to organize it keep it all organized via sequences and suble levels and also different kinds of lighting scenarios to evoke different Aesthetics and emotions and moods of your product so hopefully that was helpful like And subscribe and see you in the next one peace [Music] [Music]

Channel: ali.3d

Views: 9,171

Keywords:

Id: c2BQRiWFDoc

Length: 80min 7sec (4807 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 14 2024