Unreal Engine for Filmmakers - How to Make your Lighting CINEMATIC

what's going on guys sam here i know it's been a while and i'm sorry i've been away but in today's video i have a couple of huge announcements for you so the reason that i've been pretty absent from both the channel and the online community in general is because i've been finishing up my first major short film gemini i'm super excited to finally have it finished i'm super happy with it and i can't wait for you all to see it but the reason that that's good for you guys is because i've learned a ton by working on this project and i really wanted to share it with you so that's why i've created a brand new course in unreal engine 5 which goes over the industry standard pipeline for creating a visual effect shot using unreal from building a full scene inside of unreal from the ground up to rendering that scene with the most cinematic render settings possible as well as including a ton of data to use in the compositing stage of your workflow all the way to utilizing all that data inside of your compositor in order to get the best possible result out of your unreal engine renders so the course really is a full guide to the post-production and visual effects workflow with unreal engine and you guys don't want to miss it so check out the link below for more information on that and i can't wait to see you guys over there at boundlessresource.com so into the main part of this video which is an excerpt from the course that i just mentioned what i want to talk about today is how to light a night scene inside of unreal engine and there's a lot of different ways of lighting a night scene a lot of different styles in today's cinema especially from the softer more overcast night scene look to a harder more full moon type lighting style so in this video i'm going to be covering how to light your night scene with that kind of harder full moon type of look and the meat of the video is going to be going into how to get god rays or light shafts in unreal engine 5 for your night scene so part of what's important about a night scene is your sky or lack thereof so adding an hdri texture of the night sky and then reducing its intensity is a great way to do that and you can see me doing that quickly here that's going to set the tone of your scene and it's going to give your audience the information right off the bat that they're looking at a night scene okay so basically what i have in my scene here is i just have some fog cards that i've added and i have a couple of point lights that i've added to my scene we're not really going to go over that today what i'm going to be focusing on is the directional light and the exponential height fog and how to get nice light shafts in your scene so the first thing that we're going to do is kind of figure out our basic lighting setup so i've got my directional light and i'm just going to pull it into my scene here off the bat we have some pretty flat looking lighting what i'm going to do is go into my cine camera actor and i can start rotating this around and you do that by hitting e on the keyboard it's going to bring up this rotation setting and you can start moving your light around in your scene so we need to figure out where we want to light the scene from in the original example i kind of did something like this over here to get these nice lines and these shadows coming across and you can see the direction of the light source from this arrow right here and that's the original lighting option i chose but you can also light it from over here but what you want to keep in mind here is kind of the theory of lighting your scene and generally you want to shoot from the shadow side so what that means is my light is coming from over here so if i go on this side of my buildings if i'm looking directly from where my light is coming from you don't see any sort of shape to this building it looks really flat because you're looking at it from the same side that the lighting is coming from but if i go over here to this side now now i can see all of the shape in any surface here because we have both shadow and light here and what that does it allows your eye to see the shape of things because now we see okay this is the surface that has light and now we have a surface that's in darkness that's what shooting from the shadow side means where we're always shooting from the opposite side of the main light on our subject and this is a good example the light is coming in from over here and we're shooting from over here if we go over here doesn't look nearly as good if we rotate this around now you can see if we're lighting this from the front this scene doesn't look nearly as interesting it doesn't look nearly as good we can't see the depth in our scene but if we go back to the way we had it lit before now we can see you know this nice edge here this nice edge we can see that this is going to be silhouetted you know we have much more information about the depth of our scene based on the lighting i'm just going to leave my lighting as is right now and i'm going to go into some of these parameters in the directional light so if i go in here this is a really hard edge and what we can do to modify that is we can change this source angle and that's basically just going to increase the softness of your shadows and so if i turn that up a little bit you can see what's happening there i'm going to leave this somewhere around two and a half uh we have our intensity i might just crank this up to like 13 and what i really want to talk about here is our indirect lighting intensity so what this is is it's basically control over the lumen feature in unreal engine indirect lighting is light that comes into your scene and then bounces around onto different objects in your scene and if you look here if we set this to zero we have no light that's bouncing off of any object in our scene onto this building for example in order to enable that we can turn our indirect lighting intensity up and you can immediately see what's happening here now we suddenly have some nice lighting that is bouncing up onto the other objects in our scene it's bouncing in a realistic way so i won't get too much into this but you can at least see that now you know this lighting is bouncing off of the ground off of this building here and it's coming up and it's lighting this area right here and that is all thanks to lumen and it's really incredible that they can do this in real time now this used to be something that was only available for really lengthy ray traced renders and you have a lot of control over it so you can really you can manually dial this number in and increase that indirect lighting intensity if you choose and now you can see we have all kinds of light bouncing around in our scene we didn't have to set up a skylight we don't have an hdri backdrop or anything we just have this directional light which is really amazing and really nice to be able to light your scene that way and now we have some really nice fill lighting in our scene and it's just adding a little bit of detail into some of these shadowy areas the next thing that we're going to add is our exponential height fog it's just going to add a little bit of volume into our scene so if i turn this up to something like one uh you can see that we need to modify our fog in scattering color we're just going to turn this up all the way to white so now you can see this is going to add some depth into our scene and i go over that a lot in the course adding fog is going to give our eye information about the depth of our scene so we can tell that this object is further away than this object and that's something that really helps as a cinematographer or anybody that's creating a 3d render like this so i'm just going to set up these fog settings really quickly so i can show you guys our fog height falloff is going to be two and that's just going to eliminate some of the fog up in the tops of our buildings we're going to go down here and we're going to turn on volumetric fog and that's going to just have a more realistic reaction between the light that's coming into our scene and the fog that we have set up in our scene then we actually have control over the distribution of that light throughout our scene so if we turn this number up you can see that now we're going to get a bit of a glow that's going to focus around where that light is coming from whereas if we turn it down we're going to get a more even distribution of the light throughout the fog in our scene i'm going to turn that value up so we can see our fog even more and if we go down here into our volumetric fog we can always change the albedo of our fog and that's just going to be the color basically so we'll set it something like that and that's also going to allow us to see light shafts in our scene then if we turn off volumetric fog now we don't have any of those light shafts so enabling volumetric fog is really important obviously for those god rays which we're going to get into right now so if i go into my directional light source now we can go down here and turn on light shaft occlusion and that's going to allow us to see those light rays even better because objects that are between us and the directional light are going to occlude that lighting and so we're not going to be able to see the fog as well unless we're looking directly at the light and that means that we can see these nice god rays in here when we're obscured behind an object so if we go into our city camera actor what's important about lighting a night scene like this if you want to add those god rays you're going to need a couple of things so you need a darker background and that's going to be provided right here by this shadow area and also this dark sky that we have back here so you can completely leave out the sky or you can enable an hdri texture which is what i did you know that's kind of up to you but if you see now if we move our light around you can see that we're getting those nice god rays coming into our scene and the more directly we're looking towards the light the more we're going to see those god rays so if i go directly from the side you can't really see the god rays if we go over here like this now we're starting to see them and so as you can see when you have contrast in the background so you have a dark background you see those light shafts so something like this is an interesting look for our scene you know we don't have to mess with these settings too much you can always mess with the bloom scale that's really only going to adjust when you're looking directly at the lights so i generally leave this around that area but you can always crank it up a little bit if you choose there's a few other options in here but those are the main things that you need to to know for adding god rays and getting some nice lighting in your night scene and the other thing that's often overlooked which i'm not really going to go into is just adding a little bit of accent light into your scene these point lights are a really good way to do that so anywhere you can do that in your scene definitely make sure you do that so that about wraps it up for this video guys i hope you found this helpful and i hope that you're able to use this in your own projects lighting is one of the most important things in your scene and it's going to add a ton of realism and it's going to add that cinematic quality more so than almost any other aspect of your scene and lighting is honestly one of the biggest improvements that has gone into unreal engine 5 with the addition of lumen so you're really going to want to use that to its max potential so once again if you like this video definitely head over to my website balancedashresource.com the link is in the description and check out the course over there i think you guys are really gonna find this valuable and i can't wait to hear what you think of it so thank you guys for watching i'm glad to be back and don't forget to like comment and subscribe for more videos like this uh so have a good one guys

Channel: Boundless Entertainment

Views: 53,000

Keywords: unreal engine 5, unreal engine, unreal engine for filmmakers, film, filmmaking, unreal, engine, ue5, god rays, light rays, light shaft, fog, exponential height fog, lumen, global illumination, lighting, tutorial, how to, night scene, how to light a night scene, moonlight, course, free, free course, filmmaker, visual effects, editing, compositing, compositing in unreal engine, night scene lighting, how to light a night scene in unreal engine 5, movie, cinematics, cinematic, virtual production

Id: SMCTeoj9YaA

Length: 10min 55sec (655 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 26 2022