Unreal Engine 4 - Interior Lighting (Basics)

in this video I'm gonna step to the very very quick process of how you can implement lights into your scene in particular with interior lighting and get the results that you want with the fewest steps and fewest iterations as possible so it's going to get started so for the purposes of this demo I've put together just a really simple basic scene it's got kind of this middle pillars some wood flooring and some concrete around it so very much like just an office into your building which I hope should showcase the principles of lighting very well so before we dive in though and start adding lights and going into tweaking settings there are a couple things that we need to have set up ahead of time which I highly highly recommend you do for your scenes so there's really three things that we need to cover the first thing is is we need to make sure we have a light mass importance volume because we're going to be baking our lighting it's important that we tell the engine what what assets what parts of the scene should be baked so to do that if I come out you'll see here that I've added this light mass important's volume and scaled it around our assets very easy to add if you just go into your modes panel and you can type in light mass and there it is light mass importance volume so that's the first thing that we need the second thing that we need is to make sure that we've got a neutrally lit post-processing volume now I cover this in a previous video more in depth but it's the exact same principles here that apply so if I go back over to my modes panel and type in post you can see here post processing volume drag that into your scene scroll down and make sure it's set to enabled an infinite extent unbound so that way it covers your entire scene now the critical settings that you should you should focus on for this are very very simple expand out your exposure tab make sure compensation exposure compensation is set to one your min and Max values are also set to one that will ensure that as we light the scene the engine isn't going to try to adjust for being too dark or too light so by having just these three settings at a minimum this will make sure that we're seeing the lighting as it is and we're not going to be chasing ourselves in circles to make those adjustments the other three settings that you can make which are optional are underneath the film tab and that is the slope toe and shoulder I found these settings to be as close as possible to what would essentially be disabling disabling the tone mapper in the engine loosely translated what that means is that if you set your slope to 0.6 your toe to 0.5 and your shoulder to 0.25 it should be balanced out it shouldn't have a lot of contrast it should be for lack of better terms very very flat so again optional but you can set those and those are the only settings that we need in our post-processing volume to be able to get started and the third and final thing that we want to check is underneath our world settings we want to adjust our light mass settings so euros will probably look like this if you haven't rolled it up so click the little caret drop down you can click this guy as well and these are the settings that you should change static lighting levels scale to 0.25 number of indirect lighting bounces and number of sky lighting bounces both set to 10 you don't really need more than that and our indirect lighting quality set to 4 so what this will do is this was ensure that our lighting baked solver will be more accurate and get a little bit more light into our scene and that's it those are the three things we need set up for a scene so now we can begin the process of adding lights to our scene and tweaking them to the way that we want so let's get started with that process so the first I'm gonna do is just actually drop in a default spotlight again I'm still an unlit mode here I'll go ahead and position it to where I think this would be good for our test I'll get it close to this wall so we can kind of see what's happening and I will switch to lit mode all right so immediately out of the gate it's pretty dark so I'm not gonna change anything else other than just our lighting intensity so I'm gonna go ahead and increase this guide to say 160 and that's it default spotlight set to stationary all I've done is increase the intensity so let's go ahead and just build our lighting and see what kind of results we get all right so our Lighting's done building and as expected it's very close to kind of what we had seen by just adding the light by default so you probably seen it going okay that's cool man I know how to add lights but I need more than that so that's exactly what we're gonna do in this next process so the steps I'm gonna do I'm gonna walk through you know how do we make this light look and react like in actual light get us the results that we want but then yet still be able to tweak it with the fewest number of iterations possible so then we're not spinning all day just changing settings here and there so let's do that process right now the first thing that I want to do when it comes to making my lighting look more accurate and more realistic is to start with the basics and then advance through that so sounds pretty simple in theory but how do we translate that so there are a couple settings that I want to change first and foremost so I'm gonna go into here and really the only three that I'm gonna be focused on is our inner cone angle outer cone angle and my source radius so I'll start with source radius and this is effectively just the theoretical size of the light bulb so I'll take this to about 15 and we can kind of see that as indicated here by this little yellow sphere this is just gonna help with better lighting calculations and give us a little bit better result so I'll set mine to 15 and then for this light the next thing I want to do is increase my inner cone angle so this is effectively just the main beam of the light so I'll set this to 12 and then my outer cone angle is how how far this light affects like how kind of soft this light just pushed out so I'll go ahead and set this to 50 and again these are arbitrary now I do want to make one note kind of one caveat to this that if you're using lighting profiles which I definitely recommend for more realistic lighting you're going to need to look at that but the inner and outer cone angles are going to have a much much more intense effect when using those lighting intensity profiles the IES profiles so but focus on your inner cone angle again being that main beam of light and then the outer cone angle being you know the softness or that light how far does it fall out okay so I've got those three settings changed now and this is what I meant by my earlier comment about starting with the the simplistic stuff and then moving on to the advanced I'm not gonna worry about how much light this light is casting into the scene right now really what I'm gonna be focused on is the first point of contact of this light and so what I mean by that is you know our lights here in the ceiling and it's being you know shine it's shown down right on top of the floor so where it hits the floor this is my primary focus right now so I'm gonna focus on where it hits the floor now I'm gonna take this up to let's say like 250 and again if you remember were our post-processing volume use making sure we're not ramping up exposure very very important make sure that set it otherwise this may look like you're increasing values and then keep staying the same it's probably because you have automatic competent exposure compensation turned on and you don't have it disabled through your post-processing volume so again total sidenote but so we jump back that that is my first and foremost focus is this intensity of where it immediately contacts so I'm not gonna build lighting because with stationary and only having one light this is pretty much the result we're gonna get when it bakes so that's my first priority is to focus on my intensity the next thing that I want to do is I want to focus on where it falls off is light actually you know affecting the world like I wanted to so for that I'm gonna go ahead and build the lighting and we'll focus on those aspects so let me go ahead and kick that off and again I'm building it medium quality so we'll get some artifacts which is totally fine but that should be sufficient for now so let's go ahead and build lighting and we'll jump back and we'll take a look at the results that we get all right so our lighting is now build and as expected we get a lot of the results that we want and again I say this as expected because it's a lot easier when working one light in the same versus say you've got like 50 other lights but you can see through here again we've got our intensity this first point of contact is exactly what we want so at this stage I'm comfortable I'm happy with what the way this light is affecting that immediate point of contact it's fall off it's perfect but if I switch to game mode you can see it's really not as realistic as you want right like we're missing this bounce lighting that is probably what brought you to this video in the first place which I see a lot of people asking about how do I change this now I'm gonna show you the right method or I said at least right method this is a method I found to be the best but before I do that I want to show you another thing that you may be tempted to do so I'm gonna jump over into my world settings again if you don't have this tab it's under window world settings and underneath my light mask settings there is this option to do environment intensity and diffuse boost so I could increase these so as that lights bounce it's going to project more in from that light into the world me like hey cool that's exactly what I want yes and no we do want more of that light to bounce energy onto the walls to have that reflectivity - you know permeate further throughout the level but what we don't want is the artifacts that can come from doing this kind of global boost and what I mean by that is if you increase your environment intensity diffuse boosts yes all of your lights will push more light into the scene however you're gonna get a lot of these splotchy artifacts which is not what you want so that in my opinion is the wrong way to do it the right way to do it is exactly what I'll show you right now so I'm gonna go ahead and select my my spotlight again so I'll deactivate game-mode click my spotlight go back to the details panel and what I want to focus on here is this indirect lighting intensity so I'm gonna increase this now this will vary on your scene scale in size but for this demonstration I'm actually gonna increase this to 600 whew it's a lot but I'll kind of we'll see what happens so that's the only change I've made to the spot light so I'll go ahead and go into my build lighting we'll see what happens jump our back when it's done and we'll see the difference that it makes with that indirect lighting intensity cranked up all right so now our lighting is built and it should be pretty obvious the difference that this is made so I'll go ahead and press G again to go into game mode so we can just hide our little helpers and you can see here that light bounce that we're getting so that's what we were looking for we were looking for that energy of that light to kind of permeate into the rest of the scene to make it look more realistic now you might be saying that you know man this looks like crap well yes it will look like crap because right now we've got our build quality set to medium if we were to change this to production obviously this would take a little bit longer to build but these artifacts would be remedied so that's what we're looking for this is probably the problem you're running into when it comes to lighting is that you're getting these nice you know contact points but you're not getting that a rest rest of that bounce so to cover real quick just that process of what we did so I set my intensity so I've got my first point of contact that's solid I set my cone angles inner and outer and my source radius and I know that this is the fall-off of the theoretical bulb that I want and I'm good there the last process is increasing this indirect lighting intensity to get more of that bounce into the scene and that's it it's that simple but let's take it a step further and see oK we've set this light is this light bulb good but can it really hold up in the scene let's do that real fast and then that should conclude this quick tutorial so I'm gonna go ahead and go into here and I'm gonna move this light and we'll kind of duplicate this as if we had say like a track light now the first thing that we're gonna notice is you get this red X on the light what does that mean because we have our light set to stationary it means that they are casting dynamic lights and there is a hard limitation in unreal of for overlapping dynamic lights so this is telling you that based on the cone angles of all of these there's at least four them intersecting so that's okay for the purpose of this demo I'm just gonna switch them all the static because we can have as many static lights as we want to and I'm gonna go ahead and go in let's do build this time I'm actually gonna turn it up to production just so we can see what it is with the artifacts I'll build it and we'll jump back see the results that we get but it should be pretty obvious that we're getting exactly what we had hoped for so we'll let this cook we'll come back and we'll conclude this tutorial all right so there's our scene the lighting is built obviously a little intense on the indirect lighting for that but hopefully the principle should be pretty pretty clear by by focusing on your first point of contact with the light and then moving on to your indirect lighting intensity means you should have very few iterations when it comes to lighting your interiors now you're probably go this thing to think like well this actually looks kind of crappy which angry I think it kind of does but that's as simple as me just going in I know my intensity on the first point of contact is solid I can just go in decrease my indirect lighting intensity and now my scene is balanced and it's really that straightforward so I hope that this tutorial helped especially when it comes to lighting interiors and what you guys can do with that as always I appreciate your support drop a comment if there's things you want to see in future videos and know as always you know thanks for supporting me supporting this channel I really appreciate it so catch you on the next one

Channel: Ryan Manning

Views: 60,774

Keywords: UE4, Training, Game Dev, Tutorial, Unreal Engine, Lighting, Interior, Intensity, Light Falloff, Static Lighting, Lightmass

Id: xUEEIOyyKVo

Length: 13min 53sec (833 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 16 2019