Re-lighting an Old UE4 Environment in Unreal Engine 5

hi everyone my name is peyton and in this video what i want to do is cover how to actually relight an old environment so this environment that you see here is actually an environment that i made in college it's almost six years old or so but it's a plain workshop and i basically wanted to take this from unreal engine 4 and bring it into unreal engine 5. now the the big thing with this at least is kind of like conceptually done with the the lighting and all so the lighting does look nice and i think it has like a lot of just like softness to it but the main problem would be that it's not necessarily like game ready because the the lighting itself was actually um very like placed and uh manicured in the locations that it was uh yeah place without throughout the environment um so i think this environment probably has like 30 or 40 different lights um in it and you know in an actual game that wouldn't really like work and make sense and so i wanted to you know basically actually take it into ue5 and show how to go about doing that so now here we are actually in ue5 and what i want to do first is go about pretty much deleting all of the old lights so what i want to do is go actually over to the outliner and in the outliner i'm just going to type in light and i'm going to scroll down and basically find the different lights that we have so it looks like we have a couple of spotlights that are being used throughout the environment and this is what i mean by like them being placed like all throughout it was pretty heavily controlled and you know you look at the actual fps that we can see here and it's fp 50 fps which for a nice computer and it being six years old uh that is definitely running uh pretty slow i would say for this environment i think we could do much better actually just using uv5 so i'm going to select all my spotlights and actually delete them now i do have this little box here showing up and the the point of view basically it asking is because uh i have a light in a blueprint so it's gonna lose that target that's basically being used but that's no problem at all we can delete that and then what i want to do is additionally actually click on um i believe this is my yeah static mesh but then i have all these point lights so i think it's like at least 17 point lights and they're kind of doing in like some fill uh lighting information and stuff in the environment as well of course with lumen we'll be able to fill in the environment a lot better with that um and then yeah so i think the yeah this is just the static mesh so i don't actually need to change anything in there and then blueprint is good now so i'm gonna go ahead and delete the light mask portals and i think yeah pretty much just delete the directional lights so i want to start entirely from scratch uh that way we don't have anything else that we're actually using with this uh which i think is nice um basically yeah completely relighting the scene we have the models the textures but i really don't want anything else in the space now you can see here that there's still stuff actually showing up and that's because that's like baked lighting information so we'll go about actually getting rid of that shortly as well but real quick i'm going into the project settings and what i want to do in the project settings is actually type in ray tracing and i want to turn on support uh hardware ray tracing turn on the ray tracing when uh available ray trace skylight and rake trace shadows um and so this is basically just converting it over to the retraced environment and then additionally we'll want to make sure that we have lumen reflections turned on that way we get proper actual lumen working inside of the engine as well do want to just check off these two uh down bottom just in case we're using it with modeled objects or rendering so yeah just making sure that everything has that ray tracing selected and then yeah i'm going to just type in reflection real quick and we can find let's see actually going to scroll down to underneath engine you can go to rendering and this is where we can switch over just because sometimes if you type in lumen and it's not currently like selected then it won't show up so if you basically go over to like the reflection method we can switch that over to lumen which is basically yeah what we want for the space and then just to be sure i can also actually select the or type in lumen at the top as well after i just make sure that nothing else is um yeah needed at the moment so i'm gonna scroll back up and now i want to just basically go over just looking through one more time cool so yeah typing in lumen um want to do the lighting mode uh that's good reflections lumen so should be good to go so the big thing now is that um pretty much to get all that working with the retracing and stuff you do need to restart the engine so i'm going to go ahead and restart that now it's going to pop up and let you know and so now we have our engine actually restarted so the big thing with this is it's going to take a long time to especially with an environment like this between the models the textures and all it's going to take a long time to actually compile all of that and compute through the the shaders and everything so be patient during this time because yeah it it will take a little bit but it only really takes one time to kind of cache all this information and you won't have to do this each time that it opens up so it's yeah it's like a one and done thing but now that we have all of that going on we are going to then be able to open it back up and pretty much have our environment pretty much ready uh to start lighting and stuff we will still need to bake the uh the lighting just to make sure that we uh get rid of all that old baked information but we are going to be using dynamic lighting and everything with our environment now to where we don't have any more issues with that kind of stuff so i'm going to fast forward real quick just because it's going to take a long time and then we can get started with the lighting so now i have fast forwarded with my environment and uh the shaders and everything have compiled and this is what it looks like like i said we still have that baked information in there so just need to clean that up real quick one thing that i did want to get rid of as well is uh get rid of the sphere reflection captures um so you see that i have this warning here but i used them previously for reflection on capturing in the environment so that'll look a little bit different as well and then i want to make sure maybe just because it's such an old environment i don't know what else potentially could be in here so i might just run through and see if there's anything yeah just obviously i guess standing out lighting wise that could affect our environment but everything else looks pretty good so i think yeah we'll leave the fog in there we'll leave the particle systems and all and yeah i think i might delete i guess not i just have a light switch in there that was part of a uh like design aspect of it but it doesn't have anything to do with uh the actual lighting or the environment so i think it's good um now what i want to do real quick though is i'm gonna go up to build and i'm just going to build lighting only since we don't have any lighting or so it should clean things up but yeah it's going to kick off swarm on the side and being that there's nothing else going on it should be pretty quick to actually uh send it back to the environment and then we uh we'll have you update where it i believe should be probably pitch black because we have nothing besides the sky sphere or the skybox in the background um that's pretty much just showing uh like yeah in like a artificial environment um but then we'll be able to put in our directional light as well as our skylights so um yeah basically though like this is a much like better way of kind of lighting a scene like i was mentioning before you don't want especially for a game production uh like an environment to have like 30 or 40 different lights in it that just doesn't work and doesn't make sense um and it's gonna be weird if your character is like running around in there and you can see uh pretty much that like the light hitting the character in weird ways and stuff so what i want to do now that i have this environment is basically just yeah use like one or two lights and see what i can do with it so now that it is finished building or baking we can see that it's gotten rid of the rest of that information pretty much like i said we have here a fake sky sphere out there and then some clouds that it looks like uh we're used for uh like artificial light kind of coming through the the wood here which is pretty nice so we might play around with that um and still actually use it with our uh system but um yeah now we have a blank slate i want to go over and actually add a directional light so i'm going to bring that in and hit movable with it so there we go and boom um i'm going to yeah bump up the intensity looks pretty good i think one thing is it looks like the trees are getting hit with it uh but it might be having some issues with something else that is blocking it some might actually yeah look into that just make sure because i think there's a lot of artificial stuff happening here so i could probably delete that um and then let's see what else fly through here type in my directional light again so and it might be one thing where the the windows don't actually allow the light to come through but i don't think that's the case at the moment um there we go so yeah i just had a a bad angle for my uh lighting so i do want to make sure that as i kind of work on this i still look at the the old workshop um picture just because i think like you know we're drawing inspiration from it so i'm going to bring that up real quick and flip over to uh yeah pretty much this is the the primary shot so um do want to like i said kind of have that as the idea of like where i want my lighting and all to be um and we can of course play with that a little bit further so i'm going to yeah throw it around there i think that looks uh not half bad and then i think it's definitely a little bit warmer as well but i do want to go ahead and get my skylight in here as well so there we go and maybe i'll bump up the intensity of the the skylight a little bit so just to see how it looks um with my directional light i think a couple of things i can do is i'm going to use the temperature and i might drop this down to 5 000. so it's a little bit later in the day indirect lighting intensity uh let's say bump to two and then yeah so we're starting to get just the the look and uh pretty much the the layout of our our main like couple of lights that we have uh my one thing i might do real quick is just after we did that uh baked lighting uh setup i might just really quickly open this up one more time pretty much just restarting it so i think that'll be just safe to pretty much make sure that uh yeah we we have like everything um working properly do wanna check in the project settings real quick and gonna go to all settings again and make sure that ray tracing is on for everything which it is cool and then with the lumen like we were looking at previously that looks to be um turned on properly as well then i just want to yeah just check through here make sure there was nothing else so there we go we're pretty much set to go like i said i'm just going to real quickly restart my unreal editor one more time just to make sure that we are on a clean basis now i have actually restarted the project pretty much and things are working a little bit better one thing that i did i realized that i forgot is if you go into the project settings now we had everything turned on between the ray tracing as well as the luminous set for one thing and it's the most obvious thing with lumen of course and that is basically just the dynamic global illumination method so it was not set to lumen i did need to switch that over to lumen and then you have to of course actually restart that just to actually yeah pretty much get the uh the accurate results uh one thing i'm just going to do real quick is with the reflection capture resolution for lumen i'm going to switch it up to just a 256 or so temporarily but yeah now this is working um better to wear what we uh we're kind of wanting before i haven't changed anything else i literally just enabled that and restarted the editor but uh now we have it here you can see that with some of this like intensity we're getting a lot more proper kind of bounce light and stuff but i think with the indirect lighting intensity i can bump that up you'll see that we'll start to get some nice lighting being filled in with that indirect lighting um i do also want to make sure my skylight let's see that one's fine i don't think those are bothering anything yes so the the skylight that uh can kind of help with the environment um might actually use the yeah sky atmosphere as well um so let's go ahead and delete these pieces so those are a little bit older and then what i want to do is yeah add a sky atmosphere so there we go um this is definitely going to change things around a good bit just because it's it's definitely different than what we had previously but if i wanted to have you know my my clouds and stuff there's also the volumetric clouds that i could add in here so pretty much the same thing that i had previously with that artificial texture but they're all going to work a little bit better with each other so i'm going to jump back over to my skylight and you can see that yeah i can like fill in with some lighting if i want using that skylight and i have it turned on to real-time capture which yes now actually grabbing it from the sky atmosphere and the environment uh that we have um i'm gonna switch back over to my directional light and uh pretty much just you know start to play with kind of what i want out of this piece um i think i might have to turn up the intensity a little bit and i'll probably need to one other thing is my post process volume so this i believe has an exposure um set so you can see that that is you know pretty low um so maybe i'll do a 0.5.5 for both of these um and yeah like i said this is just the uh the min and max brightness i could also turn these off and you can see how the exposure kind of adjusts um it's getting some pretty cool results i think in here but it's a little bit blown out so that's kind of the point especially with like trying to get a consistent look inside uh it can be nice to kind of clamp it down or so a little bit so let's say that yeah i have a .25 for my min brightness and then a one for my max brightness so that's not looking too bad i might pull up that picture again of the environment and see you know where we're kind of standing between the two definitely like the back fill light that's happening before i was actually using i think a a different directional light going the opposite way to do a lot of that fill lighting in but we can probably achieve it pretty decently with a mixture of our different lights that we have going on now like it is of course going to be more accurate with the the new lighting and kind of what we're pushing but um that's just something that we need to keep in mind as we're lighting this space and i think also these probably aren't necessary i know they you know they worked decently for the other shot but i think having the um kind of the the rays coming through here instead uh works much better um and of course this is an older way of doing it as well i could actually use um some of the newer tech to get them working properly uh this is before there was like a ton of god ray features and uh stuff with our lighting so i'm gonna go ahead and just yeah and delete those out so there we go and okay those are our particles so i still need the particles but i think everything else is doing all right um and i'm going to jump back over my skylight so it's just a mixture really of like going between uh all of your different lights and working with them to tweak what you're kind of going for so with my skylight now that i have that in here and it's set up with the sky atmosphere uh i can definitely like see how i can um pretty much bring in some some more lighting to the space if i want a cooler tone in here as well i can go about you know seeing how how i could do that so let's say maybe i don't want to like exactly copy uh what i made before but i think there's a lot of nice things about it at least that makes it feel um pretty believable i would say um there is just like kind of a softness to a lot of the lighting um but i think in general the directional light could definitely be improved so yeah let's get some cooler blues into the shadows a little bit so something in this area uh just temporarily nothing like you know too crazy and then with our sky atmosphere um uh yeah basically you can go through here and take some time if you need to to uh play around with some of these values um but i think yeah it's just kind of a back and forth of what you're trying to go for so let's say that's all right um directional light i think since it is coming through the window we could see about like maybe turning it up um but then the sky is getting pretty like intense and blown out so maybe uh with that like we want to look at looks like the exposure is probably one of the main factors of that so we might actually go back to our post-process volume and let's see yeah if we cut both of these down to typically yeah i i will have both of them if i'm wanting it to not really change i'll have both of them at uh one um just because it is uh yeah pretty easy to control it that way but i can bring it up to a 0.5 or bring it down to 0.5 and pretty much just adjust everything else with that in mind so um yeah that's not too bad um now yeah like i said we can go down here and actually uh try out some light shafts uh so i'm going to maybe look at how we could get some bloom basically going there with our light shafts there and then um yeah the occlusion could be helpful too for that so that's not half bad of course we're not seeing it from this angle but if we had like a camera running through here we could definitely like get that that effect that we're kind of going for so um and like i said it's these are all things that you'll kind of just have to um play around with and tweak as you go the ones that i had placed in are more like particles um they're a lot more like artificial but they can be nice because uh you get that uh that control pretty much um to where you can see it and the thumbnails overall like you can see yeah some of it kind of coming through but i think if this was like yeah a more realistic environment uh definitely makes more sense to try to go about getting it working and this way that way it's only really happening when you're standing in the light so i need to select this one more time that's the depth range maybe i'll do point one for this uh that's not too bad cool and then let's see where's our our lighting's a little bit more um i think i'm gonna turn off the snapping that way we're getting more accurate kind of hits on the environment so there we go um i think this wall uh one problem is like the the wood itself is like white um would definitely probably try to fix that if i could um just because like it looks good but um yeah i think it's just slightly too white so maybe i could lower the um intensity here so let's convert this over to parameter and see if that works for it um incredible and yeah just slightly gonna tweak it to be uh i don't want it to be like very dark and all um but i want it to be like a bit of a lighter tone because i think just a little bit uh yet to to settle it down so it's not um like overly uh blowing out uh when we're looking at it because yeah i think just the posts and them being so contrast um it yeah it's making them feel a little bit weird but as you can see like um the lighting i think overall is working quite well in here it feels a lot more realistic and in general like we're getting some really solid bounce lighting kind of coming through the space and we already are only just using two different uh lights with that so i think like for sure like already at this point it is feeling a little bit more realistic now it might not necessarily be as i guess almost like painterly or so with how um much the the lighting was kind of controlled and edited and the the previous version and there's some spots where i definitely think we could still contribute from some smaller features kind of like the uh the light that was hitting the beams before we're not getting that as much and i think we could potentially get yes these emissives to work better but the lighting in general for the space and here uh seems to be starting to do pretty nicely so um what i want to do now is try out a couple of other features so i'm going to go over here and actually go to my post process again so i think what would be great is actually adding some bloom just a tad to make those windows kind of blow out a bit more because it is such a dark space that we're in and then maybe we'll turn on a light in here or two just to get it working properly uh or at least like you know getting some more movement throughout the space but i'm going to go down here and find the bloom settings so just need to scroll through there it is under lens and yeah i think nothing huge but i think it's set to point six five maybe we'll try 0.8 um point seven five um now one other thing that you know might be a factor as well as this glass material i think uh not sure what's actually happening on it but it seems pretty light uh so maybe we want to actually get um yeah some other just i guess tent with it so let's see here um opacity so that won't be too bad i'm gonna just go through a couple of these and there we go um opacity nothing nothing crazy like i said i just wanted to um basically just adjust it a little bit to where we're getting um yeah more indication that there's actually a window there because i think beforehand we're not getting that as much and i might even turn down the color if i wanted to uh to get some more um kind of i guess dirty brown look to it uh there we go cool so yeah that's not looking half bad i think this one is the yeah this one's the one that's a little bit blown out it feels like so i wanted to do that one as well and then trying to get the overly white windows out of there because they're a bit distracting and not as realistic as i feel that they could be so there we go cool so yeah that's looking a little bit better we've got some artificial trees out here that are doing all right definitely i think one thing that could contribute to these potentially so i'm just going to go in here real quick and add the speech recolor variation node that i mentioned in my previous video you can actually use it for vegetation and it works pretty well so i'm going to just place this in here and then amount let's say 8.04 and hit save and it should just give us a little bit more variation that way each of those trees are um yeah a bit more different i would say than um this than the same tone that they had with with the green i'm gonna exaggerate a little bit to see okay so yeah i'm going to bring that back down and this is kind of part of it like textures lighting effects like all of them kind of work together so as you improve other stuff like it can improve like the the overall scene so um it's looking okay uh definitely this red i feel like it's a bit too saturated and warm so if i were to go back and redo it i would potentially you know make the tones match up a little bit more so it's not as contrasting in the environment but other than that most of the tones look somewhat alright i would say and look looking over here we can see yeah lighting's working i think it's just some of the colors are needing a little bit of tweaking but in general like it's starting to feel more believable i definitely think like having maybe some more light filling in some of these spaces so maybe i think our skylight we don't want too much because definitely like we are going for a more realistic look so it makes sense that like you know some parts of this aren't uh necessarily like being super well lit just because like yeah it it wouldn't be that case so um that's not too bad and then i think that's where it's starting to get a little bit more uh unrealistic so um we could either find a middle ground but honestly i think i'm still liking the the 10 more um just based off of you how how the lighting's working and stuff in here i think that is feeling pretty alright so uh yeah i think let me pull this back up uh like i said like this is a lot more kind of filled in um with the lighting but there's less realisticness i believe with a lot of this and yeah how how the bounce lighting is kind of working with the space i wanted to go through real quick with my sky atmosphere a little bit more see yeah that color is alright all right cool um could see if i could get a little bit more bounce um with the indirect lighting intensity but i also don't want it to be too intense um shadow cascades are good yeah so um just kind of running through here and seeing what else we can do to push it a little bit more with the directional light at least i think most of that is all right my skylight again uh gonna up the keymap resolution a little bit uh maybe push that and then yes some cool so yeah we haven't done like a a ton with the environment overall we're just using uh pretty much i would say like the main three items that uh like of course uv5 like um the directional light the skylight and then we have a sky atmosphere attached that way we can actually have uh real-time capture from the sky atmosphere and yeah basically getting what we have right now i think like yeah this is a little blown out here like i was saying but we are pushing it more into the uh inside so i think that's kind of worth it since we aren't going to an outside space to get that that feeling and if you feel like at any point it gets too much you can always especially for inside spaces like yeah i do have some of these blockers and stuff that help with that but i think it's it's doing yeah all right mainly because a lot of these walls and stuff uh had gaps and stuff between them so i wanted to fill that in but one other thing of course is our light up here that we were talking about previously and i can actually use the emissive now with lumen which wasn't a thing before to get more light out of it so what we can do here is kind of push the intensity of the emissive so let's say we do something like that um and yeah that's definitely way too much um but that's you know pretty cool what it is doing and i think bringing down this value a bit more and the color and i think another thing too is this wall over here i'm just going to throw a basic lambert on because i had it i think all the way around where it had the emissive but i i really just want it kind of on that that top point um where we have like basically our artificial sky so there we go and yeah so that works pretty well um i'm going to push this ends um i believe and these were a lot of this was like because we were baking previously and so it it was helping get some cleaner bakes uh and make sure that yeah stuff isn't having as many issues but now that we don't have that uh let's see we can actually kind of um yeah not rely on those as much which is pretty nice so there we go boom um so yeah we have our environment now um being lit with just two or three different lights and i think overall it's uh looking pretty solid uh comparatively to the 40 or so other lights that it took to get the other environment looking correct so that's yeah pretty cool to just see how it's kind of simplified things down i would be able to actually get a much more realistic bounce with lumen and really filling in a lot of this space as we see here with our environment um i think yeah just in general this is looking pretty awesome uh now the i think yes some of this i can just turn up the intensity of the uh or the uh like cascade amounts and stuff with the ray tracing towards won't dance like that um it's just because of the the lower resolution and the amount that is kind of computing in some of those areas that is causing that but that's a pretty um simple thing to fix but i think besides that i wanted to yeah just run through here and make sure uh you can see here basically the uh the lumen scene um this kind of shows the the resolution and everything of the lighting um so you can always bump that up or so but i think uh yeah general like i was saying if i jump back over to the the detail lighting um looks pretty good we're definitely getting a lot hotter hits in the middle part that are bouncing back and hitting this part but i think that works pretty well and uh yeah feels pretty realistic compared but yeah that's pretty much it for just simplifying the lighting and taking an older environment that's six or so years old and pretty much uh getting rid of everything bringing it towards uh bringing it into uv5 and getting it set up with the the new lighting to allow it to yeah look like this so that is about it this time if you have any questions of course feel free to drop them below and i will see you in the next video

Channel: Peyton Varney

Views: 13,482

Keywords: workshop, ue4, ue5, environment art, game art, plane model, modeling, texturing, substance painter, substance designer, maya, zbrush, lighting, lumen, epic games, hangar, wood, game development, texture art, environments in unreal engine, raytracing, realistic game, directional light, skylight, unreal engine

Id: GABzSYsx3qk

Length: 42min 30sec (2550 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 17 2022