The #1 Skill You NEED For Lighting in UE5

if you want to improve your Lighting in CG the number one thing you have to do is practice and thankfully real-time rendering has made it easier than ever now you can get instant feedback so instead of waiting around for half noisy renders you can jump right into the creative parts of lighting but I think there has to be a little bit of a mindset shift around Lighting in real time because now we should be replacing those long render times with more iterations and crafting the lighting inside of our scenes so today I'm going to cover how I approach portrait lighting and lighting characters inside of unreal now I'm self-taught in lighting but I spent the last eight years working as an artist and supervisor working on Hollywood films on movies like Star Wars and across the spider-verse and I use Unreal Engine on set and to create movies of my own and I first started learning unreal because film sets are so expensive once you buy the gear the lights the cameras and hire the crew the talent your stand-ins it can cost tens of thousands for just a single shoot day by using Unreal Engine we can practice and improve our lighting and take all the time we need using just a laptop so today I want to share some of the Frameworks that have really worked for me and I'll share some of my workflows to iterate as fast as possible inside of unreal so by the end of this video hopefully you'll have the tools and knowledge and confidence to create stunning portrait lighting and understand how to make your shots and environments look like your favorite Hollywood films now everyone first dipping their toe into lighting has probably heard of three-point lighting the idea that you have a key light fill light and rim light surrounding your actor but I think there's a bit of a disconnect with this method I was given this advice early on but it wasn't clear why something worked sometimes and other times it didn't and I think this loose framework can sometimes lead to over lighting in simple scenes and it doesn't give you that confidence when going into a scene and knowing exactly where you should start placing your lights because guess what the lighting system in unreal only has five different lights that you can use and I think there's a tendency to over complicate things at the end of the day lighting is simple it doesn't mean it's easy but it is simple and we need to think how can we use these five lights to recreate the type of lighting that you would find on a film set well the big concept I want to introduce to you in this video is upstage lighting now three-point lighting is old school but by using upstage lighting you can approach any shot with characters set up your camera and know exactly where you need to place your key light and dress other lights around your scene you need and this technique is used in so many of my favorite movies from big budget action Blockbusters down to intimate Indie dramas and honestly it works regardless of genre regardless of subject matter and gives you really clean Dynamic results every time but before we get into that we need to understand the fundamentals and have a basic vocabulary for how we need to place lights inside of our scene so there's two main factors that we need to know for portrait lighting and that's light Direction and the size of the light so let's add some lights into our scene and start creating a tip typical three-point lighting setup to see how light Direction and the size of our lights affects our character so I'm using this scene which is used in our unreal for VFX fundamentals class where we're covering how to build four different environments from scratch and learn all of the fundamentals of unreal along the way check it out on unreal4vfx.com waitlist so for an interior scene we're really just going to use these three lights Point lights spotlights and rectangle lights so let's start by taking a point light and dragging it into our scene so the best way that I found to set up our lights so we can start trying out different ideas really quickly is to add an empty actor into our scene around our character and I'll call this our light rig actor and from here it's really easy to take our lights make sure to set them from stationary to movable and drag them underneath our and now it makes it really easy to rotate our lights around while being focused up and framed on our characters so right off the bat I'm going to tint our light color but one thing I like to do is use this use temperature drop down now going into the cooler ranges above 6500 tends to not make much of a difference but using this for our warm lights can really help typically for our backgrounds I like to set fire lights to something between 2000 and 2500 but it's really important to note that this goes insanely saturated orange on character's Skin So typically for anything that's on our character's skin we'll want to pull back on the saturation especially on her costume where we want to retain some of these Blues now I'm going to reduce the intensity just a bit so we're not clipping on our skin tones but we get a little bit of range in there and now we can start rotating this around until we find a nice light Direction but there's something I want to note about Point lights versus spotlights so let's bring in a spotlight into our scene let's also set this to movable and let's right click this and attach to our light rig actor and let's copy the same exact location of our Point light and paste it onto our Spotlight now if we copy all of the settings from our Point light so we'll change the intensity to six our temperature to 3500 you'll see that we get a nearly identical result between both of our lights the main difference between these two is that we can focus our Spotlight so it doesn't affect as much of our environment whereas Point lights tend to spill light everywhere so a lot of times I like to move Point lights around to find the location of the light to find a nice light Direction and Shadow on characters faces and then copy that over to a spotlight another method is to change our outer cone angle to 90 degrees because if I rotate this light around you'll see that it's not so important the rotation of the light it's much more important to change the location of our light and once we're happy with the position it's really easy to go back in and change our cone angle and really dial that into exactly where we want another thing we can do is we can cheat our attenuation radius if we really don't want our lights to affect the environment you can decide exactly how far that light is going to cast but if you want to keep this true to life you definitely want to set this to at least a thousand if not higher so that's a very quick way to change the direction of our light which more importantly is the position or location of our light but the next thing we should look at is the size of our light and how that changes in our scene so most people when they think of Lights in unreal they do think of these tiny Point lights or these tiny sources of light we can add in a rectangle light and just so we can have a direct comparison let's copy the location of our light and change it to the same color temperature now if we compare these two lights you'll see that our rectangle light has a much softer Shadow and smoother fall off and you can see by using this rectangle light we automatically get a little bit extra fill on our character now why is that the only reason is the size of our light our rectangle light has a larger surface that it's casting light from so if I look at the difference here we'll see that we're actually casting light from this square and the rectangle light actually has some additional features to change the size of our light so we have our source of width and Source height and if we set this to something like one very similar to our Point light you'll see we get the same exact falloff as our Point light or our rectangle light but by increasing the size here we get a nice soft Shadow across her face and across her body and we could increase the size to make it even softer and this can really change how the light appears on our character's face especially around their nose which is bound to cast a shadow if you have a really harsh directional light so as a rule of thumb the bigger the light the softer the Shadows the smaller the light the harsher the shadows and I think it's really important to start thinking of lighting in our CG scenes like Lighting on a film set so it's very commonplace for Gaffers to soften a really harsh light bulb by adding diffusion to the front of a light but One Step Beyond that is actually taking lights and bouncing them off of white pieces of cloth and Fusion to get an even softer light where we're not casting that light directly at all and the way that we can mimic this in our scenes is not by adding in bounce light and letting Lumen approximate what that light would be but it's by creating dim rectangle lights that have a really large surface area like this white piece of cloth with rectangle lights in our scenes the same goes for exterior scenes where it's not unexpected to throw up these huge 8x8 grids of diffusion to really soften the harsh sunlight across actors faces you can see the difference between the stand and here in the middle and the film crew behind him where you're getting these really harsh directional Shadows where our actor has a really nice soft fall off to his face so just because we have directional sunlights in our exteriors or in our cave scene we can say that it would be torch light that is lighting up our characters think of lighting like you're on a film set and you have these real light fixtures at your disposal and the one we're trying to mimic Hollywood films the more our CG scenes will start to feel like your favorite movies another way we can do that with our rectangle lights is by using these Barn Door settings there's a barn door angle and barn door length if you just set this Barn Door angle to zero it'll take these barn doors and really start to focus our light in a really directional way and this is a great way to prevent our light from spilling all over the scene and start to focus it at our actor especially in these dark Interiors where we want to be really selective about where our light is being cast but I don't think a lot of people know that you can actually change the size of your point lights and spotlights by using the source radius options by raising the source radius to something like 50 or 100 you can start to see that we get some really nice soft Lighting on our character's face here and we get a very similar result to what we get from our rectangle light now one other thing you can do is change your Source length and this will change your light from a point light into a light tube we'll see that it actually creates a long Source length here now if we add a chrome ball into our scene it'll make it really obvious what this change in Source length does to our Reflections and our specular and you can see that it creates a direct relationship on our Reflections and also how soft the light becomes as it's cast now this doesn't affect our shadows as much as it affects how light is cast in the scene so you'll still get Shadows that look like a point light if I rotate it around it won't change the Shadows but it will change the reflection and how the diffuse light is cast onto our scene and this is the same trick I used for these tracers in this tank scene which I'll actually cover next week in another light study tutorial and we'll see how we can take the same lighting techniques and apply them to environments another important note is making sure our lighting isn't motivated and this is done on set by using something called practicals so these are light fixtures that will be placed inside of the frame that are used to motivate additional lights that are off camera so these could be Hotel lamps or even candle lights and even though it looks like this Candlelight is what's lighting our entire scene there's additional lights being used outside of the frame this is used by a lot of different DPS but you'll see it all the time in Roger Deacon's work and it's a great way to make Lighting in your scene feel naturalistic even when we're adding in additional lights so in this case we have our two torches behind us which give us a reason to believe whatever light we put next to our actress whether it's a harsh Point light or a soft rectangle light just the fact that we have these lights right next to her we'll make our lighting a lot more forgiving even if it's not exactly true to life like a really small light source that you would get from a torch in fact if I turn off this light this is how much light is actually being cast onto our actress from the scene itself and oftentimes in Interiors this is how you'll start lighting your scene so you'll build up your lighting one light at a time so in this case let's keep our rectangle light and another thing that we get for free by using this rectangle light is the iolite that we get in the reflection of our character's eyes so if I zoom in further on our camera here you'll see that we get this nice soft square and it actually lines up to the size and shape of our rectangle light so if I doubled the width again we would start to see that in the reflection of our eyes as long as we have our eye Shader set up correctly here another subtle thing that isn't obvious at first but is a really nice rule of thumb when blocking in interior scenes is to make the focal point the character make that the brightest thing in your scene it's a subtle thing when your eye immediately knows where to look as opposed to adding in a really bright point light in this background but this can really start to make our scene look unbalanced and not have a clear motivation of where we're supposed to look in real life we'd probably have more brightness cast onto our walls from these torch lights but again that's why it's really important to know what reality should be and then make conscious creative choices to create the world that we'd want to see on camera so oftentimes we would add in a rim light and a fill light here which don't get me wrong it can look very nice but in a dark cave scene like this this can turn every setup that we have into Studio lighting like you'd expect to see on a Sound Stage as opposed to something that you'd find by capturing this location in real life so I've started to walk back from using fill lights and rim lights although I definitely do like rim lights I think those are a nice way to separate our characters from the background but I think the more important technique to know is upstage lighting now upstage lighting is actually pretty simple so if we created an invisible line where our actor is looking we can call this our 180 degree line or our eye line because typically when you have two actors talking in a scene and you're doing shot reverse shot we're gonna want our camera to stay behind this line so we can easily make sense of the geometry of the scene and we know that character one is talking to character two but this is also useful for upstage lighting so upstage lighting is the idea that our key light is going to be behind this 180 degree line and as long as we keep our key light on this side it's really hard to go wrong with any light position and it's really just up to taste on where we want to place it Beyond this line now what this does is it forces our light to always give us this Rembrandt lighting or this little triangle that we get underneath the eye now if we want it to be softer and flatter we can move our light further away or if we want it to be really moody and contrasty we can move it right beside our actor's head but by keeping it behind this 180 degree line it's really easy to get a nice dramatic looking shot and it gives us a really clear position of where we need to place our light now we can change the height of our light and the position but we always know roughly where our key light should be now from here we can still add in our rim lights and at least we're aware of how and where we might add in our fill but oftentimes you can get away with fewer Lights by knowing exactly where to place it in your scene to get a nice looking result I wish there was more to it but it just takes a lot of practice to dial in exactly where we need to place our lights to make them interesting to look at but also to be in line with whatever your taste is for the scene you're trying to make so try using this technique find that 180 degree line and place your key light on the opposite side and push it in every direction try different locations to see how they change the feeling of the lighting in your scene so if you want to use some of these techniques but you struggled learning unreal in the past this entire environment was built for my upcoming unreal fundamentals course which is aimed at getting people whether you're a complete beginner or you're an industry professional trying to migrate over to these unreal workflows we go step by step through creating four different environments and teach you all the techniques and workflows that you need to know along the way so you can start creating environments on your own covering all the different subjects like lighting effects creating assets inside of unreal working with characters and rendering out sequences with aovs and compositing them inside of new to create VFX shots and films so I put out a wait list we're only accepting 50 people because I want to make sure that this actually works and answers all the questions that people have as they're learning and we're going to be really hands on with this first group of people so make sure to sign up if you want a little bit more support when learning unreal for the first time go over to unrealfreviewfx.com waitlist and you'll be the first to know once it's ready so leave a like if you learned something new and make sure to subscribe to stick around because we'll be covering that tank lighting study next week and go over how we did three different lighting scenarios and how you can do the same for your own scene thanks for watching and I'll see you next time peace

Channel: Josh Toonen

Views: 46,062

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Id: jAz4Lb93gwY

Length: 17min 40sec (1060 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 06 2023