The Fastest Way to Learn Lighting in UE5

if you're trying to learn unreal I think one of the key misconceptions that people have is that they need to keep building new environments but there's way more careers that use Unreal Engine than just environment artists there's also creative roles in effects animation lighting and working on set in Virtual production and even if you're building environments you need to know how to shape the lighting in your scenes to show off all your hard work I bet most people who have struggled Lighting in CG haven't even tried to light something in real life and you don't need expensive film equipment you can do it with a lamp and your iPhone flashlight and you can learn more about learning lighting this way than setting up lights in CG and the reason why is real-time feedback well the same is true in Unreal Engine because you get real-time feedback you can try out new creative ideas in seconds so if you want to improve your lighting the number one most helpful exercise is doing a lighting study so what if instead of building environments for every new scene you took one environment and did One two five or even 10 different looks and started matching the lighting of your favorite movies do you think you've learned faster that way or by creating 10 different environments there's no contest so that's why my favorite exercise is re-lighting environments and I'm going to show you how today how to do your own lighting study the fundamentals of building out exterior lighting inside of unreal and I'll share my framework of the four things you need to know to match the lighting of any scene and if you want to get started at the end I'll give you a project file with characters environments and effects already done for you as a free download so you can try this out and improve your own lighting right away my name is Josh TuneIn and for the last eight years I've worked on Hollywood visual effects as an artist and supervisor and last year I worked on set for the virtual production of avatar The Last Airbender and when you're using Unreal on set you need to go through 20 or 30 lighting setups in a single shoot day so you need to be fast when you're trying to adapt the lighting in the CG world to the Practical lights on set so I developed a framework for myself that I want to share to easily match the light direction of any shot whether it's the onset lights in front of you or is still from your favorite movie and that's light Direction lights eyes color and intensity and I'm going to show you what to look for and how to apply these Concepts in this tank environment that I built for a short film that never saw the light of day and walk through how to apply these concepts by matching the lighting of this environment to this still from the girl with a dragon tattoo but first let's start with the groundwork and talk about the three things you need to build any exterior lighting setup inside of unreal alright so let's take a look at this tank example project this was the first of three that we'll get into so let's walk through everything that you need inside your scene to create an exterior daylight setup it's actually pretty simple you just need three different things so let me hide all of the lights in the scene here and all we need is our directional light which is our sun we have our Skylight which is going to be our fill and bounce light in the scene and then we need some way to create a sky so unreal's default Sky system is set up by having a sky atmosphere in your scene and in your directional light search for atmosphere in your details panel and then enable atmosphere sunlight unreal also has a volumetric cloud system and then you'll get sun Direction on the clouds or you can use an hdri by getting an HDR texture from the website like polyhaven and then plugging it directly into an unlit material so you just have your emissive color input and then under your content browser if you press the all folder and type in inverse you'll see that there's this object called sphere inverse normals which is a mesh that's just included in the engine itself and you can just drag that into your scene and then just apply your hdri material and then you can rotate it around and then adjust the color inside of your material instance there's also a plug-in called hdri backdrop and if you have this enabled in your scene you can click on your quick add actors menu go to lights and then drag in an HDR backdrop and this will create a curved hdri backdrop and it'll create a skylight inside of its components and you only want one Skylight in your scene so either Embrace using this hdri backdrop or include a skylight in your outliner by using the hdri backdrop you can adjust the intensity in size with a couple sliders here and your Skylight will automatically recalculate that's the real advantage of using this but otherwise if you have your own hdri applied to your inverse sphere you may need to manually update your Skylight and you can do this by just enabling and then disabling the real-time capture option and this will recalculate your scene and you'll improve some of your Reflections and then you'll start to reflect the real light color and then lastly you can add in an exponential height fog which is a great way to add depth into these larger exterior scenes otherwise we don't get any separation between this tank in the foreground and the black buildings behind him but by adding in the fog you get a clear separation and you can see the distance between this tank and the background sometimes this can be helpful to integrate some of your CG buildings into the sky itself so by increasing the fog density to something High we can change our fog in scattering color to match our fog to the background and you can even use this eyedropper and select a real color that's being cast by your Sky you can also use the fog cutoff distance so that that fog will apply to your buildings but not applied to your Sky sphere and we can do this by using the fog cut off distance if I set this to something really low like 1000 centimeters you can see that it'll apply fog up until this distance and then it will completely cut it off right behind 1000 centimeters so if I push this back so that it applies not just to our foreground but also our background buildings we can keep it so it just affects our buildings and doesn't affect the Sky Dome now that's the whole technical system that should provide you a good top down View of the dynamic lighting system when used for exterior scenes but now let's talk about the art fundamentals that go into creatively making our lighting look like our favorite Hollywood films now the first part of our lighting framework is figuring out the light Direction so let's take a look at our sunlight and see how we can create interesting shapes in our scene so if I just disable all of the other lights except for our directional light the main goal of lighting is to create interesting looking shapes inside of our scene and it's also to bring out the different planes of the objects in our 3D scene depending on where we place our lights we can draw out the different planes like the front or the side of this tank here but the biggest thing to look for when trying to match the light direction of another image is you want to look at the perspective of the shadows and they will literally point to where the light is now this is easier to tell in single Source scenes but we can see the perspective of the characters Shadow across our scene and if I Trace back their Shadows to the top of their heads they will literally point to exactly where our light is going to be off screen so if you look at the Shadows on the ground over here if you just look at the perspective It'll point to where you need to place your lights and this can be pretty helpful when the sun is really off screen is look at the shadows and think of where are the Shadows being cast and by having the directional light inside of our scene we can start to rotate this around and this is where working in real time is really helpful because it makes it very easy to try ideas out and iterate quickly especially if you're trying to match the light direction of another image the next thing we should look at is the size of our light and why I say the size of the light is because the larger a light is the softer the Shadows are going to be think about crisp the shadows of a light bulb are something that's a really small light source versus a soft box which is a much bigger softer area of light now we have to apply this idea to exterior scenes so the sun itself relative to us on planet Earth is really really small that's why on a sunny day you can look at the ground and see your exact Shadow cut out on the floor but on a cloudier stormier day or an overcast day the sun is casting light into the clouds and they're diffusing it out across the sky that sun now turns into a large soft box filled with clouds so let's try to match this still from Children of Men and switch our Sunny Sky into an overcast Sky I'll just desaturate the color to get us a little bit closer and I reset my Skylight now when I have my directional light we start to get these crisp Shadows from our tank so we can change the size of our sunlight by changing the source angle and the source soft angle and the way you can think about these two knobs is the source angle is your diffuse light and your Source soft angle is your reflection so if you want to soften our shadows we'll change the source angle to 100 and here you can see the before and after now on an overcast day less light is getting through the clouds so you wouldn't have the same brightness the end of the framework is matching the light color and intensity and that's by matching not just the Hue but also the saturation and typically you don't want to go very saturated on your directional light because it'll start to tint all of your materials in an unnatural way and then lastly is our atmosphere so we'd go back to our exponential height fog change that fog in scattering color to get us a lot closer to our background and then in this case I can change that fog cut off distance to something really high so I fog the background buildings and our Sky Dome together and from there start to play around with our fog density so that's a quick look at how to apply unreal's lighting tools to create exterior daylight scenes and believe it or not this is every lighting scenario when you get down to it it's either sunny or it's overcast but the only other scenario that we've left out is what if it's night time where we don't have a sunlight at all so let's take a look at how to emulate night scenes and this is not how to make our red vendors match what nighttime looks like outside but what night time can look like inside of a movie and typically the one trick that I've seen over and over again in a lot of these exterior scenes is by hiding a bright light at the top of our frame and typically this light is very large it has a big surface area so that it casts a really large reflection on the ground this can be seen in this rainy exterior here but it doesn't have to be raining to do the same trick you can see that there's no visible light inside of the scene it's not a very hazy or foggy scene but we have this light that's hidden at the top of frame here that's being reflected down on the concrete now what's important here to make sure that our ground material has a roughness below 0.2 and you can do this in the material or by adding in wetness decals so if we wanted to recreate a lighting scenario like this the way I like to organize my project file is by creating different levels for my effects and lighting and that way I can quickly toggle them on and off the geometry will stay exactly the same but that way I can enable them on and off and if I look at this image I'd say that our key light is definitely this light that's off screen and reflecting onto our ground now when making a lighting study you don't have to mimic everything one to one but it's worth trying to understand the intention of this original shot and they're using this light to silhouette our character and the car here and make two interesting shapes with our two objects and their Shadows underneath and we get some volumetrics coming from the top of frame so if I wanted to add that into our nighttime scene I would just create a spotlight and in order to get this amount of brightness they are just blasting this light it's insanely bright and over exposing our frame and clipping white at our bright latest highlights so I'm going to change the light intensity to something really dramatic like 1000 just to really blow up our scene and we can always walk this back and then by dragging this X and Y control we can start to move this around and start to see what type of shapes are we creating by using these lights in our scenes so I think it'd be cool if we had some helicopter light coming overhead and trailing over top of them so we could bring this behind him until we get a cool looking result on our character himself and then we can rotate this light forward so that we get some of that shadow and reflection of the tank below you can also change the fall off of the light by changing the distance of the light so the lighting fall off becomes a bit more even and it's always helpful to try to achieve some really big shapes in your scene we don't want all these tiny little shards where everything reads as micro detail when setting up lights it's better to set up a few that light up big areas and create really clear shapes in our scene and now that we have this in the right place we could go into sequencer and now we can have this overhead volumetric light that passes over top by just setting a few simple keyframes and we can cast some volumetric light by making sure we have exponential height fog in our scene and volumetric fog set to true and I have a full video on volumetric fog if you want to Deep dive on that I'll leave a link in the description the next thing to check is our light size and we can see because the Shadows are quite clear and crisp we can tell that the light source is not that big they're just pumping a ton of light into the scene so our harsh Shadows from the tank are going to be good to go and then I added some vehicles in the background to give us some depth but we don't get a lot of shape out of this we just get the silhouette of the tank itself so by adding in some lights back here and giving us some pops of highlights we have two different lights here one which is more of a rim light which really starts to reflect the result that we're seeing in our reference but because it's so far away and I want us to read more of the shape of the front of our tank there I added in a secondary light which is a bit wider and darker to give us that additional shaping and then I really like this simple color palette of these Reds Blues greens and yellows that we're getting from the storefronts it's pretty subtle but they give us some nice pops of colors so that our image isn't too monochromatic and I added a lot of these pops of Colors by just tinting different smoke cards so these are just planes that exist in the 3D scene with some animated smoke running through it and by changing the color of these we can quickly add in a couple pops of color without casting any light in our scene and you can see when I toggle the before and after and it helps separate our layers of depth like our soldiers and tanks in the foreground big ground and background but you could do the same thing with volumetric fog and then the last thing I did that's adding a lot of dynamic energy into the scene is adding in these Tracer fires and I'll just quickly show you how I created these because they're actually extremely simple all it is is a point light that I've extended the source length of so the source length will change a point light into a light tube like an LED light tube which is perfect for these Tracer fires and then attached to these Point lights is a cylinder with an emissive texture on it and then by animating them together we can create really simple Dynamic Tracer fire that reflects on our tanks and illuminates all of our smoke particles too now if you were just going to do this in Lumen Lumen doesn't do the same thing as pairing the two lights and mesh together and by adding all these different elements together we can create a pretty Dynamic scene all inspired our single lighting study image but if you want to get started and do this yourself I want include a download link for the complete project file of this lightsaber battle it has characters environments and dynamic effects just like this tank scene and using the simple framework of light Direction light size color and intensity you can break down the lighting from stills of your favorite movies and start to recreate them in CG and using Unreal so if you want to use some of these techniques but you struggled learning unreal in the past then you might like our unreal fundamentals course we'll break down all the workflows of what you need to know creating movies with characters adding animation and sequencer and rendering it out through movie render queue we'll walk through how to build four different environments from scratch to learn all of the different features inside of unreal and we have a lot of great bonuses like our materials cheat sheet blueprints for beginners and we have five Niagara templates that you can build on top of to create visual effects like impacts and explosions and add them into your scenes so if that sounds helpful go to unrealforvfx.com waitlist to join we're only going to launch this to 50 people at first because I want to to make sure that this actually works whether you're a beginner or you're an industry Pro trying to transition into using Unreal 5 for real-time visual effects and filmmaking so check it out go to unrealforvfx.com waitlist to join and if you learned something new do me a favor and hit the like button it really helps And subscribe if you want to stick around because we're going to be breaking down a short film we made entirely in unreal we went from motion capture and created the environments for tesseract's new song war of being so I can't wait to share all the lessons that I've learned along the way and check out this playlist if you want to learn some more lighting and environment tips inside of unreal

Channel: Josh Toonen

Views: 91,912

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Id: dT4Vl3PGe08

Length: 16min 56sec (1016 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 22 2023