UE4 Interior Lighting Series (Part 1)

now before we begin this series I do want to make a couple notes ahead of time so you understand what you can expect out of this series most importantly this series is going to be exclusively focused on lighting and that is creating professional great-looking lighting for interiors so in this case we're going to be using an arc phys seem to do this what we won't be covering is the actual process of importing your assets so that is going through the whole DCC pipeline we're not going to cover that in this series what we will cover though is actually modifying those assets in engine to get the best results that you can we won't focus on material setups the caveat being that you actually see how we set up kind of an emissive material for kind of our faux baseboard lighting in a little bit but it's mostly exclusively focused on getting the best lighting results that you can so with that let's go ahead and dive in so to cover what our scene is it's a very basic interior if I fly around here you can see that we've got kind of a bedroom living room kitchen and then a four year setup here this is the scene that we're gonna be working with now as I'd mentioned but earlier to some of the assets in here are from marketplace content some of them are things that we created the point being that were we're gonna have a mix of different setups that have come in and again we're gonna tweak this so we can get the lighting results that we want to without having to touch our external program so to start with they're gonna be five key things that we need to have setup before we even start to touch our lighting first thing being our neutralized post-processing volume our light masked importance volume our light masked portals reflection captures and finally we're gonna go through and check all of our light map densities and adjust those so we can get a really good baked so the first thing we're going to start with is our post-processing volume so over here I can just go in and type in post-processing volume drag it into the scene and I already have one in the scene so I'll show you but this is how we add it and in here there are a few settings that are very very critical for us to set up now if you recall I said this is a neutral post-processing volume all of our color grading and everything will occur at the very very end it's important as you're going through lighting your scene that you start with something neutral don't try to add all these special effects up front it's just gonna mess with you and make it a really difficult time to get all your lighting correct so with this post-processing volume the things that I want to have set up ahead of time to neutralize it are the following so under exposure we're gonna set our exposure compensation to zero min evey and Max CV to one so make sure it doesn't ramp up and down and start over exposing or under exposing to compensate we'll scroll down into our film and underneath our slow slope toe and shoulder slope will be point six two point five shoulder point two five where these numbers come from there's actually video I just recently published for upgrading for I think 22 and above where they change some tone mapper stuff long story short if you said these it'll help you with the contrast in your seeing Tibet and bring it back to a neutral setting and the second last thing we want to do is make sure aiming occlusion take the intensity down and our radius decrease set as well I will show this little bit later where that affects but by default values you definitely want a little bit lower than what it is and then finally the last thing is make sure we have our post-processing volume enabled and set to infinite extent unbound so if you look here this is actually our post-processing volume in the scene it's kind of yellow box by setting infinite extents it makes sure everything takes effect with this so you don't have to be inside that volume so that's our post-processing volume the next thing that we want to add in here is our light mass importance volume so if I go back over into my modes panel and type in light mass there's this light masked importance volume now what this is going to do is tell the engine anything that's contained inside of this box this is what I want you to render so it'll calculate all your lighting with everything inside so I've already added this you can just simply drag it in there but if i zoom out you can see it's this yellow box that's around it now it fully encompasses everything that's inside of here so again when it comes time for us to bake our lighting which we'll be doing quite often this volume will tell the engine hey just bake everything that's inside of this ignore everything outside of this so it'll make your rendering times a little bit faster okay the next thing that we want to add our light mass portals now what these do is by default so for example we have these windows which has a plane on it for our glass now the engine seam sees that as solid geometry so in order for us to allow light to pass through and bake we have to add what are called light mats portals so if I drag one of these in here you can see yeah let's let's drag it in so it there we go no clue why it's snapping off there but if I drag this over to here what we really need to do with these is just scale them to the size of our windows so move them get them in place so it tells the engine again hey this is go ahead and pass food now you can scale these just slightly over and it will still remember that that geometry is there as a shadow caster but general rule of thumb is try to make them as tight to the window as possible so I'll go in and hide these so I've already done that for all of our base windows and for all of our top windows you can see we've got our by mass portals there are the next thing that we need to do is make sure that we have reflection captures in our scene this is very very important all of your reflective surfaces or things that are less rough so more shiny that is how they're going to reflect the environment so to do that I can just simply type in sphere for sphere reflection capture now this is going to be the cheapest type of reflection capture so I do recommend those but you can do there are other ones so if I type in reflection you can see we have box and we've also got planar which a little bit more expensive but again for the purposes of demonstration we just need some reflections and they're so spheres will work just fine now a couple rule of thumbs with these if you can see when I dragged it in there it's quite large so this is going to encompass the whole scene from the point where this is placed that's where the reflection is going to take place so for the things that are close here that reflection capture will look really well but if I fly down here you can see that I'm pretty far away from where that capture is going to take place so to get around this and actually make our scene look much better I'm going to place a few of these so I'm gonna move this in and I'm gonna drag his influence radius down let's take it to about 600 and we'll zoom out a little bit to see okay so that's pretty good it encompasses most of this area now all I need to do is duplicate this so I can hold down alt and drag off and that will duplicate it or you can right-click you can also do I think it's yeah edit and then duplicate or press ctrl W it doesn't matter all we're doing is we're simply just pasting a few of these so there's our four which should encompass it we'll put one back here in the bedroom as well and then I think we also need one in the foyer so move this guy and there we go so now our entire scene should have of enough reflection captures now they will work themselves out automatically which one should be reflecting nearest surfaces okay and then finally the last thing and this is probably the most critical step of all is checking our light light map UV densities now when you bring in an asset there's two things that occur one is the UVs so for example if I take a look at this this table right here I'm going to pull this over and I go to its UV channel zero so this is how this particular asset was authors so these are the u-visa correspond with texture space but in unreal when you import it it creates a secondary set of UVs now you can you can override these or you can have it automatically create typically automatic is just fine but it creates the secondary UVs so your UV channel one and this corresponds specifically to your light mapping now what that means is can you see later when we go to bake our lighting this is where the lighting information is stored it's not stored in the texture it's stored in the secondary UV channels and with that every single asset has in there and let me see if I can find it here quickly [Music] right here live map resolution so every single asset has its own individual light map resolution that you can override but you can also do it when it's in your scene which is what we're gonna do now so to check this now I guess I should say why this is so important is if we have too low of resolution our lighting is going to look blotchy it's gonna look very low resolution you might notice some spots we don't want that of course the flip side of this is we don't want it so dense that's got this really rich beautiful lighting but we're having to load essentially these light textures a ton of them so we want to find that happy medium so how do you do that so if we go up underneath this tab which I'm currently in unlit mode and I go to optimization view modes light map density and I check this this is exactly what I was talking about so you can see we have a mix now what are the colors made so starting at blue and working our way through the gradation to red so you got blue to green to orange to red is our density so you can see this kind of representative I take a look here on the so this particular floor piece has a much lower light map resolution than this one beside it so what that means is when I go to bake my lighting anything that's baked all the lighting is calculated for this one is going to be much lower resolution then say for example this one for arc vis I can tell you that you want to push your light maps to the higher end of that spectrum so for example my floors my ceiling tour I'm gonna have a lot of shadows a lot of contact stuff I want higher resolution so how do we do that there's two ways we can do it we can actually go into the acid so if I bring in my my table over here again inside the asset we can actually override the light map resolution here which is great it'll propagate to all the assets in the scene that's one way a second way is actually in our scene we can go underneath our lighting tab so if you expand it and there's this override light map resolution so I can drag this up until it gets to a scale which is the kiss green or I can keep going and push it more towards the orange so ideally and I know this from kind of testing orange is where I want to be from my arc vis because it gives me the best lighting but it's still it will create a few few additional textures for light Maps but it'll give me the best visual results and that's ultimately what I'm going for one of the note that I want to make on here is your light map resolution doesn't have to be square so for example this have to be 64 128 256 512 that doesn't matter what the engine is going to do is when it comes time to bake the lighting it's going to assemble all these different pieces and it's going to cluster them together in what's called an atlas so it's gonna take those pieces fit them so they have their matching light map resolution and it's gonna fit them all within that texture space so with that my recommendation just go through here and get it to a place where you're really happy with it and then easiest thing is just to kind of zoom it a little bit so we can see here we've got the nice resolution this is a little bit low so just take this drag it up to where the grid starts to match doesn't have to be perfect but pretty close there we go so that's that's kind of the first five things that we need to have set up with our scene in order for us to get really good high quality baking results but then also make sure that our light is visible and everything is set up so again to recall set up your neutral post-processing volume the light masked importance volume light masked portals your reflection captures and then finally set your light map UV densities and with that we're ready for part two now where we can actually start going in and lighting the scene

Channel: Ryan Manning

Views: 73,645

Keywords: UE4, Training, Game Dev, Tutorial, Unreal Engine, Lighting, Interior, ArchViz, Spot Light, Point Light, Blueprints, Lighting Scenarios, Lightmass, Rendering, Realtime, Cinematic, Directional Light, Sun, Sky Light, Ambient Occlusion, Emmissive

Id: 371YAnQF73I

Length: 12min 33sec (753 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 07 2019