Lighting A Scene From Scratch - #19 Unreal Engine 4 Level Design Tutorial Series

hey there guys virtus here and welcome back to my Unreal Engine 4 level design essential series in today's video what we're going to be doing is deleting all of the lights in our scene and then building our lighting from scratch now in the last video we went over a couple of two different types of lights and what they do however what I want to do is get rid of all of the lights in our scene and build it from scratch so you can see how all of the different lighting components work together and how you can use them to get both the best results for both a visually pleasing level and also an optimized level what we're also going to be talking about is a couple of the lighting best practices to make sure your lighting is as efficient as possible now for the level that we've got in front of us we actually use the default light in template now for those of you that want a little bit more control over your level what you could do is start from empty level and just check all of the different lighting components into here what I'm gonna be doing is keeping the scene that I've got all the moments and then deleting all the lights and then putting them in so you can better see how they react with the different components like Foley it is inside the buildings and all of that good stuff so without further ado let's go ahead and dive straight into it so what I need to do then is delete all of the lights from my scene now in addition to the lights there's also a couple of lighting components that we need to work with as a level designer and I'm going to be deleting those and recreating those and that is the importance of this video so in the world outliner in the top right hand corner you need to go ahead and find your lighting folder as within here you're going to have most of your lighting components so the first one is your directional lights your light source this is your main light source for the level and essentially acts as the Sun if I delete this and press yes by pressing delete key on my keyboard you are gonna notice a scene goes really dark and that's what we want next up the next component we'll be replacing and deleting is our light mass importance volume this essentially tells the engine which part of your level lighting do you want to prioritize for the best quality so I'm going to delete this moving on we're going to keep the post-processing volume as we do like that and it's not necessarily a lighting component and we delete my skylight which is essentially the engines way of capturing reflections from the atmosphere or the environment rather and then reflecting it onto our components so even though we've got no light source because there is light from the sky it's going to look a little bit lit up delete that and you are going to see the difference moving on underneath render effects we've got a couple of things that we need to delete as well so first things first we've got our atmospheric fog which is going to give the sky the foggy lighting look moving on from there what we also need to delete is our sphere for the sky the sky sphere which is essentially a massive dome which projects things like clouds and the color of the horizon and the stars and stuff onto that we'll be replacing this a little bit later but hopefully by going through these one by one and explaining what they do you guys can see just how many components it takes to make a lighting or a level which looks good in terms of lighting your end result if you delete everything should be a completely pitch-black environment similar to this now one thing that I haven't done is deleted my two lights here so the point light and the spot light as you guys if you've watched the last video should completely understand how these work so moving on let's go ahead and show you how we can create all the lighting so in the placing mode in the modes panel go to lights and the first thing you want to do is implement a directional light actor and you can do this by clicking dragging and dropping it into your scene and this is going to be your main light source for the level so with this what you can do with this is the main function is going to be rotating this so with this so for example if you don't want your shadows to go onto your main playable area you could just rotate the sun's position essentially to move it to like a sunset position a midday position where it's top-down like I have done now so the shadows directly beneath the trees which is quite nice and this is just one of the many things you've got to think about as a level designer when you're setting up the lighting for your level you do not want to have big shadows going into the playable areas if that's not what you're looking for but I'm sort of happy with what we've got here I've got a little bit of light going into this room which is quite nice and it's going to reflect into the rest of the room where we build our lighting so moving on the next component that we need if you're happy with the rest of your settings for your directional light those settings being things like the intensity me I sort of like to go with like a free and that's usually okay but it's gonna vary on the look and the style that you're after but if you're happy with the rest of this stuff you can experiment with that if you want to you can move on to the next component and the next component that I add in is our atmospheric fog which is essentially a placeable fog actor that simulates atmospheric light scattering if I click and drag that into my scene you are gonna see exactly what that does so what its gonna do is give you a little bit of fog in the dip in the distance and I can change the can change the color of this to control my sort of horizon how the sky looks now for me I generally go with a white and let the rest of the lighting components do it but for me it's gonna add a little bit of a blue tint and press okay and I'm completely happy with this what you could do is then play around with things like the Sun multiplier the fog multi-player so you can make it more foggy it's entirely up to you I'm not gonna sit here and go through all the settings just experiment with and try and get the look and the style that you're after now one of the next things that we've got to work on is the skylight and what this is going to do like I said previously is essentially take light from the environment and reflect it onto the rest of our scene and where this comes in handy as you'll notice in this room the shadows a pitch black underneath the trees the shadows a pitch black and that is not what its gonna be like in real life because lights will reflect from everywhere in the environment so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go back to my lights tab click and drag in a skylight and notice as soon as I do that the shadows become a lot smoother and a lot more lifelike and within this room here you can see you can now see the walls even though there is no direct light source in there so you've got light coming through the door and then bouncing off onto the walls there which is nice and for this to work you do need to have your atmospheric fog in the distance just lighting up the scene a little bit with this you can play around with the light color and you can also play around with the intensity those the two main settings if you turn up the intensity you can make it brighter you can make it darker and this is going to apply to everywhere now realistically you are just going to want to leave this on one as that is where it works best so moving on from here we need a couple of other things so the next thing that we need then if we go into this is our light mass importance volume now like I said earlier what this is going to do is essentially tell the engine which part of the level to prioritize when you are building the lighting for your scene so you want to put this on your main playable areas as if you have a big volume it is going to prioritize everything and it's going to be a massive pain on the performance so like it was before what are do is just use my transformation tools to scale this little light mass importance volume that I've dragged in and I'm just gonna get it to cover the main area which for me is sort of gonna be the trees and also the liver main area that I've got here now you can either scale it using the transformation tools or in the details panel you could just set the scale manually so I can set this to like 50 by 50 by 25 and then just move it into place just like that so you can see here now then that our scene it's really starting to come to life it's very similar to how it was before and that is because we have got pretty much all of the actors in there we understand how most of these work as well now the last type of actor that we have got is our sky sphere and this is something created by epic games to give you the moving clouds and stars and all of that good stuff so let's go ahead and put that in there so in a little search package classes panel at the top here just type in sky sphere click and drag and drop it into your scene and notice now then that our scene is going to go orange in the sky and what this is doing is essentially simulating a Sun height and turning that into a sky sphere now this sky sphere is entirely optional if you wanted to you could just use the atmospheric fog but using the sky sphere you can get things like clouds and stars and so on some of the main settings you want to play around with in here and the details panel with the sky sphere selected is your Sun height at the moment it's sort of like a Sun sunsets position so if I adjust this you can make it like a nighttime position when the Sun is all the way down essentially or you can move it all the way up and have a Sun up position now you can also see it projects a little image of the Sun into the sky here so what you want to try and do with this is just line this up with your direction right so what I'm gonna do is raise this sort of all the way up to one mid way as my shadows are pointing down my directional light is pointing down similar to that and by having that in the right position it's going to look really nice with this you can see we got some clouds here we can change the opacity up to have more clouds or less clouds it was on about 0.6 before and that looked nice but if you want more clouds you can play around with that you've also got some stars but they're not really going to show unless your Sun height is all the way down like this so stars I can make them brighter or lower it's entirely up to you but you guys can play around with those to get your scene to look the way that you want it to do now that's pretty much everything for lighting at the scene itself so now what we need to do is essentially get rid of some issues that we have with our lighting now one of the main things is our shadows it's gonna say preview underneath them so that is because we have not built the lighting and the way that Unreal Engine force lighting system works is you are going to have a light map which is essentially precomputed light data which basically the player can load up and dump into the level and from there it doesn't have to dynamically load every single shadow for every asset every point light and all of that good stuff and the way that you can do this and make that light map data is by going to build and then building your lighting now building your lighting can take a lot of time and one of the ways to quickly go through that is to change your lighting quality to preview instead of production high or medium preview is for like a quick check where as production is going to be your final quality testing so you do this just before you send off your game for release you know that kind of stuff and one other thing that I wanted mention before I go any further is when you're working with point lights if you have too many of them close together which I'm gonna show you now you are going to notice quickly enough that some of them are going to get this red X on them and that is because I have too many lights too close together and the required resolution for the light map is just going to be too high it's just not gonna work so just be very careful about your point light and spot light and your lighting placement just be careful with it but for now you can see and you should have better control over your lighting in your si you should know how all the elements work and should be able to work with the difference between a nighttime scene and daytime scene a sunset scene and all of that good stuff so what I want to do is end off the video here but make sure you do go ahead and build your lighting every so often once again guys thanks for watching stay awesome keep creating the boy virtus signing out this video was made possible by my supporters on patreon if you want more videos like this check out my patreon page using the link in the description to stay up to 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Channel: DevSquad

Views: 119,375

Keywords: Virtus Education, VirtusEdu, Unreal Engine 4, SDK, Tutorial Series, Level Design UE4, Beginner, Virtus Learning Hub, Epic Games, Level Design, Create a game map, Landscape, Advanced, Level Design Tutorial UE4, Unreal Engine 4 Level Design, Level Design Tutorial Series, Unreal Engine 4 Tutorial Series, Create Video Game Level, Level Editor, UE4, Edit, Content Browser, Assets, Static Mesh, Creating, Terrain, 3D Model, Lighting, Point Light, Sky Light, Directional Light, Light, Scene, Fog

Id: FsjqVIyr0O4

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 10 2018