How To Setup and Manage Your Lights FAST with Environment Light Mixer (NEW in Unreal 4.26)

hey guys and welcome back to another video today we're going to be talking about how to get exterior lighting set up very quickly and in turn how to get those lights managed as efficiently as possible so without further ado let's get started so if you're anything like me and you're often working with the directional light the sky atmosphere the skylight and volumetric clouds all these environment lighting tools um you'll quickly realize that it's become very cumbersome to work with all these tools right here in the details panel you know one at a time it you know you're changing settings in your skylight you're changing the value of your directional light it very quickly becomes a real pain to one at a time go through each of these menus now as a 4.26 epic released a new tool called the environment light mixer so we're going to go ahead and delete all the lights i placed right here and start from scratch so i grab grab these four delete all totally blank slate now you're going to want to go to the windows tab up here and right here you've got the environment light mixer so it's going to open a window here i'm going to have a dock down here for cleanliness now the first thing you're going to notice you've got you've got about some five tabs here so we're going to go ahead and we're going to create the skylight create atmosphere light zero create sky atmosphere and create volumetric cloud now you'll see this is totally not looking right and the reason why for that is um like this so we're going to click on minimal here going to go to normal and advanced in your directional light setting you're going to search for atmosphere you're going to uncheck sun atmosphere sunlight and check it up again the next thing you want to do is in your skylight right here you're going to want to click on real time capture okay in very few clicks in two seconds you've got a very nice looking lighting setup very quick very simple nothing complicated so another little tip here so if you press control and l and you hold it while moving your mouse cursor you can easily move the your main directional light around like this this is not something i use all the time but it's it can be handy when you're just kind of experimenting you're not sure how things would look at a different time of day um so it's kind of nice to work with so the first perk of using the environment light mixer is you have quick and easy access to creating all the necessary tools to get your environment light set up the second most important perk of using this tool is i'm gonna go ahead and maximize this make it full screen you now have access to all your light tools all your light settings within one nice window so i made it full screen now normally i would have this maximized on a second display but for the sake of this video i'm just gonna maximize it on my full screen right here so as you can see i have access to everything now if for example this is too much for you you don't want all that information all that all the setting you can go ahead and set this back to minimal or normal personally i like having access to all my settings without having to like hey wonder where did the setting go why is it hidden um so i like having this the normal plus advanced and that's pretty much it it's as simple as that so not only do you have a way of quickly creating a lighting setup for your environment but you also have access to everything you need in one nice clean window instead of having to do this so if i wanted to change the brightness i would have to click on my directional light you know adjusting the intensity and then oh i need to bump up the brightness of my skylight click on the skylight you know change the setting here so set it to one two three four um or if you want to change volumetric clouds you know what i mean it it just really it's a pain to have to click in the outliner and not just that it's a matter of finding it in the outliner as well because you know sometimes now it's a pretty simple scene but you have a lot of objects you're seeing sometimes you need to go actually use the search tool search for a directional find your directional choose the settings switch your skylight so on and so forth the environment light mixer it gives you much easier access to all the setting that a lighter may or may not need so one more thing i would like to add is that this only works for environment light so atmosphere based light so this includes direction light the skylights the atmosphere the sky atmosphere sorry and the skylight so if i go ahead and create like a spotlight a point light and a wrecked light you'll see these don't actually show up even if i have this unchecked right here to only show up in spherical lights my other lights they just don't show up so it's important to know that this only applies for your environment your global exterior main light so this won't apply for small local lights and in a way this is a really good thing because i often place you know like street lights and stuff and it's in a scene and i don't necessarily want those cluttering up my environment like mixer right here i want just the global environment lighting settings to be accessible within this window so it actually would be nice to have the option to but for now that's not the case so if you have any questions at all or if you have any suggestions for future videos do let me know in the comments down below i really love reading your comments and i get back to you as fast as i can so don't forget to like and subscribe hit the bell if you want to be aware that i have new videos out and i'll see you guys next week

Channel: William Faucher

Views: 33,388

Keywords: Unreal Engine 4, UE4, Unreal Engine 4.26, UE4 4.26, 4.26, Lighting tutorial, UE4 4.26 lighting, Tutorial, Environment Light Mixer, Realtime Rendering, Cinematics, Dynamic Lighting, Realtime Lighting, Lights, Unreal

Id: EFE0i85ifmA

Length: 4min 58sec (298 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 05 2021