Unreal Engine 5 Beginner Tutorial Part 5: Lighting

by the end of the lighting chapter you are going to achieve the exact same look in your spaceship just look at the lighting what's up everybody Welcome to bad decisions Unreal Engine beginner tutorial series we are now at chapter 5 lighting congratulations to all of you who have finished our modeling sections absolutely you're now a modeling Pro yes right now it's time for you to become a lighting Pro and lighting is so important if you look at any movies or even 3D if you've done 3D then you already notice that lighting is probably one of the most important parts of 3D without it your models as beautiful as they might be will look like crap because the lighting is bad so we're going to learn the basics of lighting here first we usually do this in the very beginning of our projects but since this is the beginner tutorial series we didn't start with lighting because we had to teach you guys how to move things around the scene so that's why but usually want to start out quite early in order to start our lighting we want to go ahead and create a new blank scene just to mess around with some lights that we have and then we're going to come back here and block out our scene and then actually light up our hanger not from the sky cuz Star Wars is not in in Blue Sky a blue sky it needs to be in space so we're going to come back here later and fix all of that for now we're going to go back to selection mode and then we're going to create a new level make sure you have saved everything all right we've already saved we're good kids we're going to go to file new level and we're going to go ahead and open up a basic level okay basic level create and as you can see in our basic level as we told you guys earlier if you hit if you hit crl L you'll be able to change your son's position in the sky and the lighting will react to it now farad what happens if I go ahead and just delete all of this Darkness absolute Darkness loneliness so we want to go ahead and bring all of this back so if by accident you delete something you want to come back to the default sky with the clouds or you started at an empty level which it will look like this this is how you bring the lights back exactly there's actually a toolbar that allows you to do it really quickly so you can go ahead and manually bring them in the place actor panel but we don't want to do that we're going to go to window and we're going to go to environment light mixer and all you have to do is literally just Spam click all of these buttons just like how fire hard used to play taken and uh Street Fighter when he was young I beat him all the time by the way we should do a challenge we will do a challenge we will see we will do a challenge you want a bet you want a bet bet you want to play right now FIFA let's go okay all right so we're going to start by just hitting everything Skylight atmospheric light sky atmosphere volumetric Cloud height fog and just like that we're going to close this as you can see we've brought almost everything back into our scene and we have the lighting here again if you use contrl l it'll be back in there and we can see that it works perfectly so environment light wixer is your friend you can use it all the time to quickly bring in a sky and a sun to your scene we're going to go ahead and select all of this control select the floor and player start drag it into our lighting so it's not confusing player start we're going to delete we don't need that and now we are going to go ahead and bring in a cube into our scene just so we can see how it's reacting to the different kinds of lights that we're going to bring into the scene so here we're going to go to add and here's another tip for you if you don't want to constantly go ahead and click this you can actually come all the way down here Place actors panel if you hit it it opens up the same bar at the left side so you can go ahead and choose anything that you want like the lights or the shapes and then you can constantly bring in anything that you want you don't have to keep going back to the drop down just a little nice tip for you so contrl Z we have our Cube we're just going to keep this here and then we're going to reset its location bring it to the middle of our scene bring it a little bit higher and we're going to increase it in size okay just so we get a nice shadow at the back we see what it looks like right okay perfect so fot right now we are looking at a directional light yes okay and the directional light in other software usually don't come with the sun and the clouds here it does which is perfect we can actually go ahead and remove the sun and the cloud sorry the clouds and everything so atmospheric uh sorry height fog Sky atmosphere Skylight volumetric clouds and you can see that the directional light is no longer a sun it's literally just a directional light so using contrl L we can go ahead and switch it positions and this is what would get in other 3D software usually you just have your viewport it's dark and you bring in a directional light it acts like the sun and in this case we can go ahead and see the details panel as soon as we select it on the right side what can we change well first of all if you go ahead and change his rotation on the x-axis nothing happens but if you change his rotation on the y-axis something actually does happen because technically you're rotating the directional light around your scene that's what contr L does and also Al the Z so the Z and the y- axis is what you can use to change its location the location actual location of the sun doesn't really matter and the scale also doesn't really matter so now we're going to come down to the light settings so in the light settings this is going to be the exact same for well not exact same it's going to be almost the same for all of the different kinds of lights that we have if this is your first time in 3D we have multiple different types of light just like how you would in in real life right now me and fart have a big lamp in front of us that is diffusing light we also have sort of a rim light at the side which basically emits light differently and they are used in different scenarios it's the same thing with the 3D software so here Farah what do we have in the first option intensity so that is pretty self-explanatory right increase it and we're increasing the Lux of our light so it's not too freaking bright so contrl Z we're going to decrease it and you'll see that it's absolute Darkness right we can then go ahead and change a light color to a warmer color a warmer color okay we can do that or maybe green this is stylized or a colder color cooler color like blue yeah perfect now me and Farah can't even tell if this is blue or purple blind yeah I can't tell so contrl Z Now the next thing we're going to talk about is Source angle think of source angle as how sharp your shadows or how smooth they are so if you go Ahad and increase the source angle look at what happens to our shadows so if you decrease it it's absolutely sharp which is not something s very realistic I always like to increase that number a little bit and see what happens now our shadows are a little bit smoother so it's a little bit more natural right and the bigger the source of light the smoother and The Wider the shadows will be and the smaller the source of light this is exactly the same in real life it will be very very sharp Shadows right very sharp edges on the Shadows we can now go ahead beyond our sliders as well this is the same case for anything that comes with a slider in un engine you can actually just go ahead and increase this number number to let's say 20 or 50 and you'll see that the Shadows are actually even smoother you know when I started UE I thought that when you max out the slider this is the max that you can go dude that's exactly what I thought as well and I was like no why did they just close it off why did they limit it they never did it's just they want you to have a limit in the beginning but you can actually go ahead and increase or decrease it right and then you have the soft Source angle which I never really use I actually don't know what this does can we read this angles sub Ed by Soft light source in degrees like it makes a tiny difference but I I really can see it most of the time so we don't really play around with that then you have used temperature this is if you want to go according to the warm and colder temperatures so this is not a stylized color this is like real life so you have the colder temperatures and the warmer temperatures I'm going to disable that then these two check marks are basically just saying do you want the light to affect the world no that's absolutely dark or cast Shadows no that means no shadows will be casted by this light um of course this is not very realistic then you have two more settings here that we're going to talk about indirect lighting intensity which means the light that is hitting this Cube and now bouncing off to the floor and then bouncing back to the cube bouncing off to the floor just like in real life it has these indirect impacts on the cube which is basically lighting up the back area right here if you go ahead and increase this slider what do you think will happen far it would be brighter it will be brighter yeah absolutely so you want to go ahead and increase the impact of indirect lighting you can do that or you can reset it back to its normal value or even go to zero which is absolutely not realistic but hey that's a cool stylized look right like an anime look yeah so you can play with that then the last one what is this fire volumetric scattering intensity I don't know okay I'll tell you so basically if you played with 3D software before you would know that one of the main things we'll do to make scenes more cinematic is ADD fog if youve been to clubs have you been to clubs before no never never right I don't like going to clubs I I I promise you if you check out farot's Instagram you will not find anything okay so if you actually go to nightclubs right when they have those fog and smoke machines they exist there so that when they're shining those lasers you can see the lasers go through the light and the light rays so in 3D if you want to create a really nice cinematic mood we like to play with fog and the cheapest way to do that here in the engine unless you want to actually have a smoke simulation is to use something called the exponential height fog so let's go ahead and enable that again it comes with the environment light mixer right by default so if we enable that at first there's nothing but if you go ahead and check out the setting called fog density it says basically how dense do you want your fog to be this value is right now really low we'll increase that in a moment but there's one other option that we need to check and we need to care about which is volumetric fog so this basically if I were to explain it it allows you to have those light rays right it enables you to have those light light ra and like the sun imagine if you were creating a forest scene and you wanted to have light rays go through the leaves that beautiful cinematic look you need to have volumetric fog so enable this guy and automatically far do you see it I can see the fog around the cube yeah and now we're going to go ahead and increase the fog density and look at what happened to foggy yeah too foggy but I think let's keep it for now just so we can see the light race so it's easier to talk about the light so right now this is our directional light and already I kind of like how atic this looks I I don't know it's just my preference so contrl L let's move the light do you see it y okay you can even see the light now coming and you can even see the Rays the Rays right in a way but because this is a directional light this kind of looks a little weird let's go ahead and talk about our next source of light so let's delete the directional light far we go to our lights right here which one should we try next Point light Point light okay let's do that so what do you think the point light does compared to the other lights it's like like a light bulb it's like a light bulb but it's emitting light in all directions so it's like omnidirectional and it's also one of the more expensive lights because it's shooting rays in all directions and right now if I go ahead and move it closer to my Cube I can see that it's working but it's first of all very very small it's not intense at all and also there's some other setting that we have here that we didn't have in the directional light cuz directional light just goes all the way this one has something called the attenuation radius which means how far do you want to shoot your light rays so before we even increase the intensity let's increase this number okay actually let's decrease it to see the effect so you see I'm still using eight intensity eight units but my attenuation radius says how far do I want this to go yeah this is to Art direct your your Lighting in your scene right so I'm going to go ahead and contrl Z increase the intensity and you can even see now thanks to the fog the source of our light do you want to know what happens if we turn off the fog you you can't see anything you can see the light but you can't you you can yeah you cannot see the source anymore so turn it off look at what happens this is what you would normally see with the fog with the fog you'll see this and if you go ahead and turn off the volumetric fog you won't see that anymore so that's why the volumetric fog is really important in order to see it and it's perfect for our use case right now so what else can we do with this point light increase the intensity okay so we can go beyond 160 as well right so let's go 500 it's like super bright right now and the attenuation rate is too low so let's go and increase that and see what that does to our scene oo like Harry Potter at the the end of the wand so if you were to attach this to the end of the wand it will look exactly like the Harry Potter movies lumus lumus is it Maximus lumus Maximus I mean yeah I think so do you did you forget no lumus is Lum you forgot I you're supposed to be the Harry Potter nerd I said yeah but it's lumus Maximus no Maximus I think is lumus Maximus it's lumus search it search it I think I can lumus Maximus wait wait search Lum the game no in the game it would say lumus maximus but it's lumus I know I read the book you never you never read the book no see lumus Maxima no it's not okay fine all right no it's Harry Potter see lumus Maxim say that you lost lumus Maxima say it I read the book five times if there are any Harry Potter nerds can you comment down if lumus Ma lumus I read the book it's lumus okay fine whatever see okay never compete with a Harry Potter I give it to you I only watch the movies so we can go ahead and play with the light color of course I'm not going to do that with every light cuz we've already done that and then we have the source radius here again look at the Shadows increase the source radius you'll see the Shadows are now a lot softer and the source soft Source radius makes a little bit of a change do you see this do you see this bottom part of the grid look at what happens when we increase the soft Source radius so if you want to go Ahad and art direct your scene just play around with this value to see what happens for you the source length actually just lengthens our Point light like so and you're seeing it it's like a lightsaber now which is actually perfect for us okay reset this value everything else you are already aware of we're not going to touch it for now okay let's go and bring in another source light which one do you want next Spotlight Spotlight okay all right bring it up we're going to click this light right here and delete it and now we have the spotlight click it if by any chance you don't see it maybe you pressed some random key that key is probably g g basically disables overlays in your scene all these icons and gizmos if you're just trying to have a cinematic view of your scene so hit G again just to bring back the over overlays so we got the spotlight intensity is super low let's bring it up attenuation radius bring it up now find our Cube which is right here Fire Let's increase the intensity right it's too little 500 500 bring it up now here unlike the point light which is emitting lights in all Direction because we're only emitting lights towards One Direction think of this like the theater light the spotlight we can actually rotate the light towards the direction so hitting e and rotating the light I can rotate it towards my specific object right and then now when I pull this oh oh oh oh when I pull this up a little bit I can then go ahead and play with some of the extra variables that I have to really create that theater look right which has a super sharp edge and we can do that using the extra settings we have here which is inner cone angle and outer cone angle so check this out I'm going to bring up my inner cone angle and I can see it actually displayed here and I'm going to stick my outer cone angle to it look at what happens to the exactly like theaters I think people who actually work with Lighting in real life would really enjoy this part this is the best thing about Unreal Engine when it comes to the cameras and lights it's actually quite precise so you get to emulate real life with it and so that's why it is absolutely beautiful for people who work in real life we don't we suck at real life lighting like yeah we don't really touch it aside from the podcast and now but but yeah we do touch it in 3D so this is basically your Spotlight everything else is pretty much the same you got a source radius The Source length right which doesn't do much here in this case the soft Source radius play around with those values and see what difference it makes last but not least check out the volumetric right you'll see it I'm going to go ahead and deselect it and look at what happens this is because it's volumetric this looks exactly like from a theater yeah right now this is your Spotlight the last thing we're going to check out is called rectangular light in other software sometimes this is called the aial light so here it's called rectangular light and it is a rectangle right it is your favorite light it is my favorite light it's the one I use the most and I like the most I'm going to rotate it and it's emitting light in One Direction right over here and with rectangular light the control that you have now is your width and your height so you can go ahead and increase your width and your height and if you notice you actually do not have a source um Source length like the last not Source length the source angle and the reason for for that is because in in real life if you have a box that is emitting light like in the movies the size of the Box depends sorry the size of the Box decides how sharp the edges of your shadows are which is why right now if I increase let's go ahead and just increase the attenuation radius here so that we can notice it look at the Shadows right if I want the Shadows to be sharper I just have to decrease the width you'll see I don't need a source anymore my source is my width and height so it it works like differently and I want you guys to be aware of that there's two more extra settings when it comes to the rectangular light that you need to be aware of which is right here the Barn Door angle and the Barn Door length and if you decrease one look at what happens I'm closing the flap right and then if I increase one look at what happens oh you make it more directional yes precisely so you can create a light that looks exactly like this wait listen did you know that you can create highly full photo realistic scenes with photogrametry by taking in what exists in the real world into 3D we've been using polycam to do exactly that using our phone and drone yes that's right and guess what they sponsor this video to give you guys 30% off their Pro Plan so you guys can go ahead and try it for yourself use the code bad decisions in the link in the description back to the course we just taught you the basics of all of the lights inside Unreal Engine it's time to go back to our main scene and block out our scene and set up some lights light it up let it up okay so we're going to go back to our levels here spaceship click it we don't need to save this level so don't save we don't want it anymore all right so inside this level right now I'm going to delete this floor now I don't need it anymore delete it and let's go ahead and quickly bring out our block so in order to create a block out of our scene we already know based on our reference which I can pull up right here we have AA spaceship at the back we have these armies located on the sides and then we have these Tie fighters located here and then more Storm Troopers at the back so in order to clearly understand where these are going to be placed we're going to be using cubes to and represent them and we have the place actors panel so let's go ahead and bring out a cube put it right there this is going to be almost in the middle of our scene which is good enough and then we're going to scale it up and have this act as our spaceship like the Lambda spaceship is it called Lambda yeah I think so thing it's called LDA okay so that's good for that and then we're going to pull this out right and then we're going to bring it to the side this is going to be our army I'm going to make this much smaller you can use other representations it's completely up to you this is just how we like to do it okay so this is one of the armies here and then here let me just pull this in make it a bit smaller hold it in here hold it to the side and then I I like to duplicate this by holding Alt and then dragging cuz I want the same Army on the left side and then I'm going to select both and then duplicate it again one more time right here so this is going to be one of the armies and then duplicate it again they're going to be here another one of the uh armies and they can be different sizes later on we don't have to decide that and then I'll take in one of these guys duplicate it again hold alt and this is going to be my Tie fighters they're a little bit fatter and taller so I'll represent them like this and there's going to be four of them so let's do one here faras did you know that if you had a TI toy you could actually use photo gometry with polyam to bring it to the scene oh no you didn't do that that was good that was good that was good we should have bought one yes a stormtrooper jet fighter you could use polycam to 3D scan all of them and bring it to your scene and it would look absolutely photo realistic it's going to look more photo realistic than if you were to create one yourself here because well it's from a real life by the way guys if you want to give polyam a try I'm going to put the link in the description below okay perfect so you blocked out that scene we blocked out the scene so right now we actually have the Big Spaceship we have the armies right here and then we have the little TI Fighters are going to be here just a little mockup of what we think the scene is going to look like is going to help us down the road to find out exactly where they're going to be placed right and also help us light the scene right now so to quickly light the scene I'm just going to bring in rectangular lights for myself that's what I like to bring I'm going to bring in one okay and I'm going to place it here and I like to rotate it face it downwards so rotate it 90° and that's 95 so 90° and then bring it higher okay I'm going to make it much wider again this is the first time I'm lighting the scene I don't need to be lighting it up in the most perfect manner I just want some rough lighting I'm going to increase the intensity to something like 500 which is not a lot I need to increase the attenuation radius okay that's good you can see it's lighting up the scene I'm going to go ahead and disable my default lighting I don't need it anymore and just like that you see that our scene is being lit by this one light now I'm going to before going and crazily duplicating this I'm going to go ahead and create a new folder for my light all right actually I'll just delete all of this right we don't need it anymore and I'm going to drag my rectangular light into the lighting folder and now I'm just going to go ahead and ALT duplicate alt duplicate and then I'll hold all three so shift select all three and I'll actually duplicate them again bring them all the way to the top that way we have a super bright which is not even good it's too bright actually right now do we need that we actually don't need that anymore I think we can take this higher in the and put them in the middle I like that idea okay so select all three and bring them higher yeah I think that's good and this is perfect okay perfect guys we are done with our lighting chapter that's right you're now a lighting master and I just want to remind you guys the lighting is an iterative process you'll start by setting up a few lights in the beginning and you'll constantly change them and see what looks good for each scene so don't worry if your lighting doesn't look great right now we're just trying to have some lights so that we can see what's in our scene so you're actually doing very good right now just keep going congratulations to all of you who came this far the next two chapter are one of the most important ones we are going through materials and texture so make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to get notified when we upload those videos all right see you guys on the next one ciao ciao

Channel: Bad Decisions Studio

Views: 26,155

Keywords: unrealengine, unreal engine 5, unreal engine, ue, ue5, Unreal Engine Tutorial, Unreal engine for beginners

Id: 19p7M8fvluo

Length: 23min 21sec (1401 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 06 2024