Lighting in Unreal Engine 5 for Beginners

today we're talking about one of the most underrated aspects of 3d and that is lighting those of you familiar with my channel know that most of my unreal engine videos target the more advanced users so i figured i would change it up a bit and talk about lighting for the absolute beginner if you don't know anything about lighting or how it works let alone how to get things looking good in unreal engine this is the video for you and just to be clear in this tutorial we'll be using lumen in ue5 with a fully dynamic lighting approach we will not be learning about baked lighting so i'm not going to waste any more time with the intro let's jump straight into lighting right after i tell you about my sponsor so a big thank you to cg spectrum for sponsoring this video cg spectrum is a global top-ranked training provider offering specialized online courses in real time 3d game development animation vfx and digital painting they're an unreal authorized training center and unreal academic partner and their courses include personalized mentorship from industry professionals i helped develop their real-time 3d technical and virtual production course i mentored their part time myself and here are a few examples from some of my own students so if learning unreal engine with the help of an industry mentor is something you're interested in do check out the link down below or visit cgspectrum.com for more info you'll get the most practical and up-to-date knowledge connections skills and industry awareness that studios in both the games and film industry are hiring for so thanks again to cg spectrum for sponsoring this video and now let's jump straight into lighting all right so now that we're in unreal we need to make sure that our project settings are set up correctly to make sure that everything behaves as expected to get the best possible results and make the most of what lumen has to offer so we're going to go to the settings tab up top here click on project and in the search details panel we're going to search for directx and we need to make sure that our default rhi is at the directx 12 and directx 11 and 12 sm5 is turned on next we're going to scroll down to the rendering tab right here and by scrolling down to the lumen section right here we need to make sure that we have the following project settings set up correctly dynamic level elimination set to lumen array lighting mode set to surface cache software ray tracing mode set the detail tracing shadow map method set the virtual shadow maps beta and one more thing that i like to have turned on is support hardware ray tracing turn this on and use hardware ray tracing when available now keep in mind the hardware ray tracing settings are only going to work if you have a gpu that is capable of hardware ray tracing so any of the nvidia rtx cards will work just fine if you don't have a gpu that can do ray tracing don't worry it's not the end of the world you're still going to be able to get good results but i like to use it because in many cases ray shadows will look much better as you're going to see a little bit later so with these project settings changed you're going to have to restart the engine and it's going to have to recompile all the shaders so go make yourself a cup of coffee and then we'll be ready to get started so i'm going to x this out and now we have a blank scene here and i'm going to show you everything you need to know about every light that is available in unreal engine 5. and in order to create our first light we need to go to the place actors tab and in the little lights icon here you'll have a list of all the available lights if your ui looks a little bit different than mine don't worry you can go to the windows tab load layout and i'm using the ue4 classic layout just because i like the way that it is set up to me it works a little bit better so if you want to follow along this is the layout that i am using so let's start off with the first light here and that is the directional light i'm going to drag and drop this into my scene here and as you can see as i rotate around here the direction the light does what the name implies it behaves a lot like a sun or moon light or any kind of light that is very directional in nature so directional lights are usually used for exterior environments or when you want to have sunlight shining through a window for interior environments now what's really cool about lumen is that it just works out of the box and as you can see here we've got some nice indirect lighting lighting up our character here because if lumen was disabled it would actually just be pure black like this but thanks to lumen we do get a little bit of that nice bounce lighting bouncing off the ground here now you can choose the settings of every single light in the details panel on the right hand side here so here we've got the transform tab we've got the mobility and the light setting so we can choose the intensity of the light like this we can choose the color of the light like so or alternatively you can choose the color temperature by clicking on this but and making the light warmer or colder like that now you're gonna see here we have a bit of a weird thing called mobility and you'll see we have static stationary and movable so unreal engine has two different lighting methods we've got baked or static lighting and we have dynamic lighting now this tutorial is not going to cover baked lighting because baked lighting is a little bit more advanced there's way more moving parts there's a lot more that can go wrong i myself prefer to use dynamic lighting because what you see is what you get there's it just works very well out of the box it works extremely well with lumen and it's actually way easier to use and is more beginner friendly if you are interested in baked lighting i do have a tutorial on baked lighting right here i'll put the link down below the like button so static and stationary lights are for baked lighting exclusively you may have seen this message over here before that's because your light is either set to static or stationary so to get rid of this message over here just set your lights to movable you'll also get better results some lights actually don't look right if you don't set it to movable the default is stationary so when you create a new light just switch it to movable right here to be safe so the next light we're going to talk about is the point light and the point light again does what the name implies it's a point of light very similar to a light bulb it emits light in all directions just like the directional light you can control the light color the intensity of the light here same thing next we have the spotlight and again the spotlight does what the name implies it is literally a cone that emits light in a spotlight fashion so if you want to have light being emitted in a conical pattern the spotlight is the way to do that you can control the shape of the light in the detail panel of that spotlight next we have direct light here and this is possibly my favorite light of all time because direct light behaves the same way that a softbox does for any of you who are familiar with photography or filmmaking soft boxes are what gives us very soft diffused lighting it is very appealing to use for portraits or any kind of cinematic work notice here how the shadows are nice and soft and diffused whereas if i delete this and play the point light you'll see these shadows are completely hard the reason for that is because the rec light is a bigger light but we're going to get more into the specifics of that really soon so again direct light here gives us really nice soft shadows looks absolutely fantastic and by increasing the intensity you'll see the shadows get nice and soft as they move further away from the subject here you can change the size of the light like this by adjusting the source width and the source height to make a larger light source if we pay attention to my chrome ball over here you'll see the reflection of the wrecked light show up and if i change the source width like this you'll see the shape of the light is actually changing in the reflection so that can be very handy to know about now the next light here is the skylight but i'm not going to talk about that right now the skylight is a bit of a can of worms it's a beast of its own and i've actually made a dedicated tutorial about the skylight right here again i'll put the link down below we will be using the skylight in this tutorial but in a different context now the last light actor i want to show you is the hdri backdrop and if you don't see that here don't worry you just need to enable the plug-in for it so we're going to go right here to the settings tab go to plugins and we're going to search for hdri and just enable this plug-in restart the engine and it should show up in your list right here so the hdri backdrop is awesome because by just drag and dropping it here like this and moving it up a little bit there we go now we have kind of a skylighting showing up and lighting our entire scene up very nicely and as a result it has an hdri projected on a dome here so if i select the sky here and press the f key you'll see the hdri is projected on the dome if i were to change the cube map here in the details panel to something like ostrich road 4k and going back here now we've got a nice overcast day feel very misty cool little mountains and a road we can change the projection center by clicking on the little diamond here and lifting it or lowering it accordingly it's a really cool little tool to use but i wouldn't use this as my main source of light in my environments but it can give you a really good starting point we can also increase the intensity of this hdri backdrop in the details panel right here so now that we have an understanding of all the light we can create i want to talk about lighting basics and some of the most important things to know when it comes to lighting and that's shadows so by deleting this right here i'm going to create another point light right here if you remember just earlier when i showed you the erect light we had really soft shadows that's because the light source was bigger but what if i told you that we can get soft shadows with any of the other light actors that i just showed you so right here i've got my point light selected and i'm going to zoom in here and you'll see in a detailed panel here we have source radius if i start increasing this like that you'll notice a bit of a yellow gizmo show up around it that is actually the size of our light so we can actually give it a shape and a size and as a result notice what happened to the shadows the shadows got soft if i make it smaller back to zero and make it larger notice my shadows are getting softer this is what we call the shadow penumbra and basically it really boils down to the larger your light sources relative to your subject the softer your shadows will be this is the most important part of lighting understanding how to get soft shadows understanding when shadows should be soft is the most defining part of taking your lighting to the next level because when you have an understanding of how when and why shadows are soft you're going to be looking at lighting in a completely different way a classic example to demonstrate when shadows are soft versus when they shouldn't be soft is to think about when you're walking in a parking lot in the middle of summer on a cloudless day the shadow the very hard and sharp very harsh lighting but then you look at an overcast day and the shadows are all soft and you might think that contradicts what i was just telling you the larger the light source the softer your shadows will be but the sun is the largest light source in our solar system so why would the shadow be sharp and the reason for that is because while the sun is huge it is also extremely far away and as a result it's just a tiny little point in the sky but an overcast day however the entire sky becomes our light source the light is diffused by the clouds and as a result that softens our shadows even though the sky is physically smaller than the sun the sky is closer to us and as a result it softens the shadows so we can change the source radius on every single light except for the skylight and the hdri backdrop so by deleting this light here and if i create a directional light here such as the movable if i increase the source angle to something like 10 you'll see my shadows got soft and notice what happens in the reflection of our chrome ball here this little white dot here is our sun if i select my directional light and change the source angle back to default it is much smaller and our shadows are sharp again make it larger so set the source angle back to 10 and it softens our shadows this is the secret sauce this is the magical setting that can really help you take your lighting to the next level now with that said i want to take the time to show you the difference between the default lumen virtual shadow maps and ray traced shadows so to demonstrate that i'm going to create a wrecked light here i'm going to drag and drop it here like that and what i want you to pay attention to is the following so by zooming in here you'll see the shadows are kind of sharp they're soft but they're also kind of sharp we get this odd banding we get this artifact here the same thing here we get a bit of a hard edge there this is a limitation of virtual shadow maps you can't push the shadow penumbra that far before it starts falling apart that's where ray trace shadows come in this is why i recommend using hardware ray tracing if you have it it will make a big difference so if i select my wrist light here and search for rey you'll see here i've got cast ray tracing shadows i'm going to set this here and before i do pay attention to the quality of the shadows right here so to enabled you'll see the shadows got much softer much better no more ugly artifacts the shadows are just better in every single way it's day and night it's no comparison to demonstrate this even further i'm going to rotate my light like this put it way above like this and make my light massive so i'm going to change my source width to something like 300 by 300 and so now we've got this really cool moody top down look on our character here right the shadows are very soft and diffused the lighting actually looks pretty cool but if i select my rect light here search for ray and revert this back to default virtual shadow maps notice how now the shadows are ugly again they really look terrible especially here we get this nasty harsh lines again i'm pushing the virtual shadow maps their absolute limits here don't worry in most situations virtual shadow maps are fine i just wanted to really demonstrate the difference between raytraced and virtual shadow maps okay so again if i set this back down to enabled we get this really really nice soft shadows it looks a lot better you'll notice though that when you push it too far you'll see we got a lot of noise showing up here and i hope you can see this in the video but that's an easy fix in the search details panel we're gonna search for sample and we're gonna set the sample per pixel to four and as a result it cleaned right up everything looks a whole lot better this does have an impact on performance however so keep that in mind now you might be wondering why i have four random spheres of different colors here these spheres are there to help you gauge the exposure and lighting of a scene we've got a black one with an albedo of 0.04 because no natural material out there is pure black coal has an albedo of 0.04 so i'll be using that as my baseline we've got a white one with an albedo of 0.85 because the albedo of fresh snow is about 0.8 to 0.9 no object or material out there reflects 100 of all the light everything absorbs at least a little bit of light so you don't want any material in your scene to have an albedo value of one it's not physically possible and it will throw off your lighting then we have a gray ball here with an albedo of 0.18 which is actually the middle gray value you would think that the middle gray value between 0 and 1 is 0.5 right 50 gray well not quite exposure is a bit more complicated than that and it is not linear this may seem counter-intuitive but 18 gray is in fact the middle gray between black and white this gray ball helps you figure out the correct exposure of a given scene at least it should give you a really good starting point then lastly we have a chrome ball which helps us see what is being reflected in the scene i recommend having these in your scene at all times when lighting they're really going to help you now one of the main advantages of using lumen involves the ability to control the indirect lighting so to demonstrate this i've created an amazing looking house right here so by going inside here we'll see we do have a little bit of indirect lighting coming in on the top here and a little bit on the side but it's not very much and fortunately we have three different ways to control the amount of indirect lighting using lumen the first and easiest way is to select your light and increase the intensity of your light so let's say if i set this to 50 you'll see as a result we get way more indirect lighting coming inside here but you know it's still not very much the next thing we can do is again selecting our directional light and you'll see here we have indirect lighting intensity if i set this to higher to something like 5 you'll see our indirect lighting has been accentuated quite a bit but that leaves us our third option and this is actually the option you should keep in mind most of the time when you're using lumen the albedo or the base color value directly contributes to the amount of light being bounced around so by selecting this wall right here and opening up the material itself you'll see this base color of this material has a value of 0.18 as i increase this value the indirect lighting will be accentuated accordingly so if i set this to 0.5 notice how now we have way way more indirect lighting in our scene because like i said the base color is the reflectance of our object so the brighter our object is the more it's going to reflect light this is exactly how materials behave in real life so if you notice that your environment feels a little bit dark and the indirect lighting isn't really doing what you think it's supposed to be doing make sure your materials are not too dark this can help you get some extra indirect lighting for free basically without having to change any other light settings and alternatively if you want to reduce the amount of light being bounced around you can turn down the brightness like this and as a result very little light will be reflected this is very important to keep in mind when you're lighting your environments always pay attention to the base color or the albedo value of your textures and your materials hey so future will chiming in here i just wanted to take a quick moment to talk about something i get a lot of questions about and that's in regards to very shiny reflective or metallic materials so zooming in here on my chrome ball here you'll see we get some reflections but this doesn't really look like a chrome ball at all right because everything is black this doesn't feel very metallic and you might be wondering why the reason for that is because there's nothing to reflect in the scene you'll see we have a totally black empty blank scene and as a result metallic or reflective materials are not necessarily going to look right because shiny reflective materials are dependent on having something to reflect so a quick and easy way to get something to reflect in here is to add an hdri backdrop like we added earlier like this and you'll see right away we have our sky and our environment around it working just fine and the reason that's working is because this hdri backdrop has a skylight actor in it so i'm going to delete this and i'm going to create a skylight i know i said i wasn't going to show you the skylight in this part of the video but in this case it is actually kind of important in the search details panel here we've got source type we've got sls captured scene and that's essentially going to basically create an hdri based on what is around the skylight again i talked about that in my skylight video right here but what we're going to set it to right now is sls specified cube map and this is basically where you load in in hdri and so contrary to the hdri backdrop the skylight is not going to create an actual dome around you this is only going to light your scene with an hdri so in the cube map section right here i'm going to select none and just load in whatever cube map that is already loaded you can import any hdri you want a great place to find these is by going to polyhaven.com they have a huge library of free hdris to choose from so great resource right there i'm going to use the hdri forest right here and you'll see now we have our forest hdri in here now you'll see the bottom of the horizon is totally black and that's because in the skylight if we scroll down in the advanced tab we have lower hemisphere is solid color i'm going to turn this off and now you'll see if i hide this plane here we now have our hdri affecting our chrome ball the way we would expect so that is how you can get reflective or metallic materials to kind of render correctly so to speak again reflective materials are dependent on having something to reflect and if there's nothing there they're not going to reflect anything so pro tip and with that said let's go back to past will now one last thing i want to show you before we start lighting our environment that's emissive materials so i'm going to create what we call an emissive material because lumen actually allows emissive materials glowing materials to emit light as i'll demonstrate right here so we're going to right click in our content browser create a new material i'm going to call this emissive zero1 i'm going to open this material up and i'm going to create three nodes i'm going to press and hold the one key and click press and hold the three key and click and press and hold the m key and click i'm going to select these two nodes right click convert to parameter and i'm going to call this one light color i'm not going to call this one light intensity i'm going to plug light intensity into b of the multiply node and plug the light color into the a of the multiply node and plug the multiply into emissive color i'm going to set the light intensity to something like 100 and set the light color to something ridiculous like a bright flashy orange or something like that and hit okay now we're going to hit save i'm going to make this window smaller and i'm going to apply this material to one of our spheres here like this and if i hide this rect light you'll see this emissive material is actually casting light it is actually casting shadows and this is awesome because it can help give your environment a little bit of oomph but you don't want to rely on this too heavily because if i zoom out here you'll see a if i zoom out too far the light disappears and you'll also notice that the light itself is very noisy and splotchy so like i said you don't want to have your entire scene being lit exclusively with emissive materials it's not going to look very good but i still wanted to take the time to show you that this does work so now that we have an understanding of how the lights work how to bend and shape the light the way we want now we're ready to get started and light this entire scene here from scratch so i'm going to go ahead i'm going to delete all of these lights and start off with a completely blank slate and you'll see it's a whole lot easier than you might think so i'm going to be using the mega scans abandoned apartment scene that you can find for free on the epic marketplace so go ahead and download that if you want to follow along now before we get started i want to do a little segue into explaining that lumen works a lot better with nanite meshes performance wise you're going to get much better frame rates if you convert as many meshes to nanite as possible i've made a dedicated video on nanite right here so you can check that out if you're so inclined but if i go here to lit go to nanite visualization triangles you'll see everything that had a colorful triangle on it is actually a nanite mesh this project here the mega scan the benton apartment scene does not have nanite turned on by default so what i did is in the content browser i filtered by static mesh and i selected the static meshes i wanted to convert right-click nanite enable again i don't want to dive too deep into the advanced settings here because this is a beginner tutorial but still i wanted to point you in the right direction so with that little segue done i'm going to delete all of the lights in our scene here and start off from total scratch and just so you know this environment here have a sky box in the scene we can delete that for now we're not going to need it so if you're like me and you've deleted your lights and you still have some lights in here and then it's not totally black like i had it the reason for that is because there is still some baked lighting information in the scene we're going to click on the settings tab up top here go to world settings and we're going to search for force and we want to click on force no precomputed lighting click on this hit ok and now we just need to go to the build button up top here and click on build lighting only and now once you do that all of your lights will be completely gone there are no more lights no baked lighting information and we're ready to go so now you'll see we have a completely dark scene and what we're going to do now is use unreal's most underrated tool the environment light mixer so going to window env light mixer and we have a new tab showing up here and what we're going to do is we're going to create skylight create atmospheric light zero create sky atmosphere create volumetric cloud and create height fog you'll see okay we have something here but if we move to camera outside you'll see we now have an entire atmosphere sky system done for us with just a few clicks if i press and hold a control l shortcut and move my mouse you'll see the sun moves in our sky the clouds react accordingly and our sky changes color based on the position of the sun in the sky this is such an amazing tool and i use this every single time i start a new project hands down every time doesn't matter if i'm making an exterior environment or an interior environment this provides you a fantastic starting point so i wholeheartedly recommend that you use this moving forward if you're working on an exterior environment this gets you 90 of the way there on the first try so now we're going to go down here back into our scene i'm going to use the ctrl l shortcut to get the sun shining in the rough angle that i want it to something like that but you'll notice that depending on where you're looking where you're pointing the camera to now you'll see the interior of our scene got a bit brighter but as i move the camera this way everything gets dark again the reason for that is because of auto exposure and the next step is to actually turn off auto exposure because that's really annoying and i don't like that i don't want unreal to automatically adjust the brightness of my scene for me no bad dog so what we're going to do is we're going to create a post process volume and this is quite possibly one of the most important tools in your scene the post-process volume is where you control the exposure of your scene some camera settings the all the lumen quality settings your ray tracing settings so you need to have a post process volume in your scene just so you know i will call this the ppv moving forward it's easier to say so now in the place actors tab i'm going to search for post and drag and drop a post process volume in my scene like this the actual position of the ppv does not matter because in the search details panel here we're going to search for unbound and set the infinite extent unbound on this means that the post-process volume is going to affect the entire scene regardless of where it is in the level by the way pro tip if you want to hide these icons here you can press the g shortcut now we need to select our ppv and search for exp short for exposure and this is where we're going to disable auto exposure so now we need to change a few things metering mode we're going to set this to manual and now you'll see it goes totally black that's fine don't worry next we need to check apply physical camera exposure and turn this off so now this is how you can easily disable auto exposure because now regardless of where the camera is looking it's not getting brighter and that's good we don't want unreal to do that for us but you know it it's way too dark obviously like it doesn't look like lumen doing anything for us why is that and you'll see that the sky is actually well exposed right the sky looks great it's fantastic and you might think that's weird but this is exactly how cameras behave in real life and looking at this example here if you've ever been inside and you tried to take a photo of something outside if you expose for the outside the inside of your house or your apartment or whatever will be completely underexposed alternatively if you try to expose for something inside the windows will be completely blown out overexposed way too bright this is how cameras behave in real life because cameras don't really have the dynamic range to capture both the very very bright areas and the very very dark areas okay so understanding exposure is really important as a lighter i cannot stress this enough it's so important and so i'm going to demonstrate how we can drastically change the look of the scene with one slider you do not need to go ahead and select your directional light and you know increase the brightness yes that will work like that but we don't need to do that because then it kind of throws off the brightness of all the other lights if you have multiple light systems in your scene i'm going to leave everything at default and all i'm going to change is in the present volume change the exposure compensation slider here and i'm going to increase this slowly see now this is before and this is after by adjusting one little exposure slider we haven't changed any default settings of any of our lights it just works really well just like that and now we have lumen doing all the hard work for us by lighting up the rest of the apartment with indirect lighting see here the light is kind of shining through the door hitting here and bouncing up and lighting up the rest of our scene it's fantastic and if i hold the ctrl l shortcut you'll see the lighting changes drastically as the sun changes that is the beauty of lumen lumen makes lighting so much easier with just a few clicks using the environment light mixer and adjusting the exposure compensation we got our scene in a very good place i would say we're about 85 to 90 percent done already but there's still one or two more things we can do to really push this scene to the next level and what we're going to do now is we're going to select our exponential height fog scroll down and we're going to turn on volumetric fog because i want to have some god rays shining through here and i'm not a huge fan of like the bluish tint that the fog has here switching this to volumetric fog is going to fix that for us so by clicking here you'll see now we got rid of the bluish ugly tint and we got a bit more god ray shining through you'll see the god rays are not very visible though so we can go accentuate those very easily by selecting our directional light and scrolling down and we see here we have the volumetric scattering intensity i'm going to set that to 10 to really exaggerate it for effect and you'll see now we have god rays shining through our windows thanks to volumetric fog so you'll see environment light mixer exposure compensation volumetric fog and we've gotten our scene in a very good place as i rotate the sun the fog is going to update automatically it is frankly ridiculous how easy it is to get the scene looking so good so quickly now i do want to show you a nifty little way to art direct the volumetric fog a little bit if i zoom in here and you'll see the volumetric fog is visible from the side right what we can do is we can change the way that the volumetric fog behaves and how it looks by clicking on the exponential height fog actor here scrolling down to the volumetric fog section and we're going to change the scattering and distribution value to something like 0.9 and your first reaction may be oh no we lost our god rays but not quite they're just visible differently if i move the camera to have it looking up towards the light like this you'll see it's a very dreamy light shaft shining through here depending on your shot this can absolutely be the result you want to go for if i were to revert this back to default settings which is 0.2 right here you'll see it's similar but it's not quite the same look right again 0.9 it's a little bit more of a slightly dreamier look there's no right or wrong answer here this is purely an art direction setting this allows you to get full control over the look of the shot you're going for but for now i'm going to leave it back at default settings right here because i do like the god rays being visible from the sides like that now while we're here you may notice that we have a little bit of flickering up here sometimes in some of the indirect lighting areas we get a bit of jitteriness i hope you can see that in the video it's not always very obvious but hopefully it just gets the point across there's a few things we can do to fix that or at least make it a little bit less noticeable so we're going to go into our ppv in the search details panel we're going to search for lumen and the setting we want to change here are the lumen scene lighting quality final gather quality and the final gather lighting update speed i'm going to set this to 2 set this to 2 as well and set this to 0.5 and now hopefully you can see the jitteriness is not quite as apparent it's still kind of there but it is a lot better than it was if i revert this back to default you'll see it's definitely a little bit worse so using these values can definitely help your scene jitter a little bit less this may not be the finest example but i hope it gets the point across so here i'm going to show you real quick how to utilize the four spheres i talked about earlier in the video by placing them right here you'll see this gives us a pretty good indication of what the exposure of the scene is at and what the brightest and darkest materials are looking like so you'll see we can clearly tell the shape of every single one of these spheres that tells us that this scene is pretty well exposed if for example i select my post process volume and under expose a little bit something like that this part of the scene might seem fine but looking at the black sphere here it almost disappears in the shadows that tells us that our scene is a bit underexposed anything that have a very dark material will just be clipped and may disappear conversely if i were to overexpose the scene a little bit something like that this might seem great looking into the hallway here this might seem really good but we can kind of tell that we've lost some detail in our white sphere here it's not an exact science these spheres are really there to just guide you more than anything else so going back to the exposure that was before you'll see now all of our materials are kind of in a good place but neither one is so extreme that we lose detail in the highlights nor do we lose detail in the shadows that is how these can really help you especially the chrome ball the chrome ball should always feel pretty well integrated in the scene it should accurately reflect whatever is around it if you're noticing some weird highlights or some weird light shining on it you'll know right away what's causing it so now that we've set up a very quick and easy daylight system like this this is all fine and great but what if we wanted a totally different mood right so this is kind of a very dreamy late afternoon type of feel but what if we wanted to make this scene a gloomy dark overcast day feel how would we do that again we're going to select all of our lights and start from scratch i'm going to select everything except for the ppv and the fog because i want to keep both of those again now we have a totally dark scene to work with what we're going to do now we're going to create the hdri backdrop and drag and drop it into the scene like this i'm going to move it down a little bit lower and just like that i mean literally one click we're in a pretty good place already it's not perfect but as you can see the hdri backdrop did a whole lot of work for us right we got some nice soft lighting coming to the door here nice light coming into the opening in the wall it looks really good now again we're only about eighty percent done there's still one or two more things we can do here to really make this okay so as you'll see right here in the video we got a whole lot of jittering in here and that's again usually due to the fact that it's only indirect lighting so we're going to add a bit of direct lighting to help with that and what we're going to do is i'm going to go create a new wrecked light right here i'm going to move this up like that move it outside rotate it towards us and i'm going to make it much larger so something like 200 by 200 like that something like this and maybe i'm gonna make it a little bit it's a little bit bright now so i'm going to make it a little bit darker scroll down set the intensity to one or two so this is with it off and it's with that two you'll notice the red light really gave us a bit more of those specular highlights those little pings on the leaves it helps make things pop a little bit more so again if i just toggle this light on and off it's subtle but it makes a difference having these spheres in the level is very helpful and tells us that our scene is pretty well exposed the black material is pretty dark but not so black that we lost any and all detail on it and the white sphere here is also bright but the highlights are not completely clipped either the gray ball tells us that that's the midpoint and the chrome ball as always accurately reflects whatever is in the level now if you remember back in the lighting basics part of this tutorial i used raytraced shadows to get some better shadow detail and i'm going to do the same thing here so by selecting this light here search for rey and i'm going to turn raytray shadows on everything gets a little bit softer a little bit better just before and after before and after it does soften things quite a bit so now i'm going to go ahead and do the same thing to this window here by selecting my light press and hold the alt key and drag to duplicate the light i'm going to move it here rotate it like that and i'm going to make the light a bit smaller rewrote it to a default size and kind of find a nice point for it something like something like that i think looks pretty good it's nice to get that extra little bit of light coming in from the side here it looks pretty good and now i'll do it one more time for the door over here just to get a little bit more light coming through the doorway here press and hold the alt key drag and i'm going to move this light right over here just outside our door of our scene here like that go into the hallway and see how this looks let's say something like that there we go before and after i may actually make this light a bit darker because it's a bit strong here for my tape so maybe a brightness of one this is off and this is one so just a little bit and then just a little bit helps there we go and now just to get a bit more mood in here i'm going to select this light and i'm going to set the volumetric scattering intensity to something crazy like a hundred this may be too much 50 20. so this is off and this is 20. i just want to add a little bit of haze just to add a tiny little bit of localized fog right here just a little bit to help give our scene a little bit of oomph here and just like that with two or three wrecked lights with one hdri backdrop we've got our overcast scene looking pretty good it's in a very good place right now and that's what i mean lighting doesn't have to be complicated you just need to know about the tools that are available to you it's really as simple as that and that's it guys you've learned everything you need to know to get started with lighting in unreal engine so guys i know this was a long one most of my videos have been really long lately i'm not sure what the deal is with that but hey it is what it is i hope you found this video helpful and if you did do consider subscribing and giving it the old thumbs up thank you so much for watching and as always happy rendering

Channel: William Faucher

Views: 693,375

Keywords: Unreal Engine 4, Unreal Engine, Cinematics, UE4 4.26, UE5, Realtime, realtime rendering, rendering, CGI, 3D, 3D Artist, UE4, Unreal Engine 5, lighting, lighting for beginners, lightning, cinematic

Id: fSbBsXbjxPo

Length: 44min 43sec (2683 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 10 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/PV3D]

This is a great tutorial. Even for someone with years experience, it's a good refresher video.