YEAR 2 PORTFOLIO
Mechanics
LIGHTING
Using almost every video game as a reference, it is evidently clear that the addition of lighting exponentially enhances many aspects of a project, from level-of-detail to story-telling and themes. For example, many horror games utilise lighting in order to induce fear and un-ease to the player, such as sudden stopping of light, which overall boosts the quality of the game.
Within my project, I wanted to use lighting in order to showcase my assets and textures in an environment that would reflect their quality. In addition, I also wanted the lighting to set the overall theme of the alleyway, with dark corners and skylines being lit up by colourful neon lighting in order to achieve the cyber-punk effect.
MAIN LIGHTING
Using UE5's sky lighting, I managed to begin to set-up the different layers of colour and lighting within the project.
To do this, I simply reduced the brightness of the sky-sphere, as well as changing the overall colour to a warm orange.
In addition, I changed the backdrop of the scene to a custom image I downloaded of distant cities and skyscrapers.
This all allowed for the base layer of the lighting to be put in place. The darker, yet warmer lighting was a good ground level to then build off of with more colourful lights, whilst also allowing the scene to feel natural and realistic. In addition, the custom backdrop added to the immersion of the cinematic; the subtle and short sections where you see the sky do not break the immersion of the entire cinematic, due to the sky fitting the theme of the whole project.
NEON LIGHTING
Now that the base layer is down, I then wanted to start building contrasting colours onto it.
I achieved this by creating an blue-purple gradient LED material, which was added to most assets within the alleyway, as well as the external light fixtures. Next, within UE5 I added a point light, which provided a subtle source of light from the area it is placed in. I changed the colour to purple, then turned the intensity of the light down a lot, as I didn't want the neon lights to over-bear the shadows and dark theme of the scene.
Overall, the bright, yet subtle LED lighting contrasted beautifully with the dark metal assets and night-time theme of the alleyway.
However, I also believe that the colour of the point light could of been upgraded in order to match the LED material. In the future, I would create a custom colour for the point lights, changing it from a basic purple to a purple-blue gradient, very similar to the base material of the lights.
EXTRA LIGHTING
Finally, there were a few extra assets that needed light sources within them, such as the windows of the apartments.
For most of the windows, I create a simple warm white colour material, which I decreased the intensity of the lights before assigning to the glass of the window. However, some of the windows were assigned a copy of this material, but the intensity was greatly increased. This resulted in most windows emitting a small level of light, yet a few emitting a brighter source.
This overall gave the illusion that the brighter windows had internal lighting turned on, which not only gave variation between the apartment windows, but also provided a small level of detail and story.
Overall, the extra lighting was solely to make some assets feel more realistic, however the very slight emission from these assets resulted in a third source of lighting for the scene, which added more variation and realism to the project.
However, in the future I think I will enhance the light material in order to make it look more realistic.
CONCLUSIONS
In conclusion, I found that the lighting that you implement into your projects heavily impacts the overall quality of your scene; having multiple different sources of light, as well as a fitting contrast between them, allows for a more realistic, immersive experience.
I believe that I mimicked this concept very well by utilising the contrast between the dark colours of the background and asset materials, and the bright and colourful neon lighting casting light onto it.
However, I also think that I could of made the lighting better if i had more time. In the future, I would like to experiment with UE5's new LUMEN lighting system, due to it's hyper-realistic look which would further enhance the details on my assets.