Final Renders and Conclusion

This unit taught me a lot about scene lighting.

I feel I learned more from observing and researching using the already built demonstration scenes, such as Reflections and the Library, than looking at the Unreal website tutorials, as I felt the practical and observation method suited learning about such a visual subject.

I feel my final result is pretty good for a render scene, but the settings and route I had to take to get the lighting effects I did would not work so well in a game.

My scene is set up so that it can be observed in real time, but it really bogs down my machine when used in this way. Others may have a better experience with their better processors and graphics cards.

It would be interesting to see in the future if a similar level of quality can be achieved with some sacrifices so that it can run better in real time, but the point of this unit was to create the best visual render quality.

Here are some renders from the scene, plus additional renders can be produced by using my project file (provided to the college) and using the HighResShot 2 console command.

Rendered Video Sequence

Here's my final rendered video sequence:

Peer Feedback

I asked for feedback from a class member.

What do you think of the general lighting?

Nick: The scene is lit quite nicely, with no areas being in complete darkness and thanks to the amount of torches and the lighting in the corridors being present is nice too.

What do you think of the effects, sun rays, water effects, ceiling reflections, torches, candles, etc.?

Nick: The manual god rays fit nicely, beaming in from any general user would assume the directional light to be. The reflections in the water are a particularly nice touch also, reflecting in-engine elements from across the room.

What do you think of the renders and the video?

Nick: The renders and video are nice, with appropriate scenes being taken into account for the stills, the sequencer is maybe a little long for me personally, but it showcases the level and the lighting within well.

Any general feedback on how the lighting or effects might be improved?

Nick: The one criticisim I have is the continuity in textures between the general wall segments and the upper, arched wall/ceiling segments. some more attention could have been paid here, but considering the time constraints and level of quality throughout the scene as a whole, it is a very minor criticism to give.

Camera and Sequencer

To render out a Camera scene, with an animated camera, I used the Sequencer and a Cine Camera object.

The sequencer is almost exactly the same as the one featured in Maya. I used the Maya sequencer extensively during a previous Unit, so this was relatively simple to pick up.



I moved the camera around the scene, capturing interesting angles and adding key frames where required.



At certain points the automatic smoothing didn't act as expected, so I had to go in and edit the sequencer curves, in the same way as I had in Maya's Curve Editor.

When rendering the sequence out the first time, I noticed some scene drop-out as shown in the shot below:



I tracked this issue down to a Project Setting called Occlusion Culling. In a real gaming environment you want the fastest possible performance, this setting un-loads objects not in view from the render scene, which causes a slight gap when they are re-added to the view. As this is going to be a render only scene, performance doesn't matter so much, so I turned the setting off and this fixed the issue.



The sequencer is a much better interface than Matinee, and seems more robust to scene changes. It isn't just used for editing camera animations, it can animate any object or setting in the scene. The key-frames and curve editor approach is much more industry standard and because of my experience of a similar interface in Maya, I was able to pick it up relatively quickly.

Wet Cobbles Vertex Painting

In another post, I covered how the Wet Cobbles material was pieced together from research into materials.

This material is set up to take input from Vertex Painting. Basically this means that the amount that a certain colour is vertex painted onto certain areas of a model is the amount and areas where the effect will show.

This is demonstrated below, the effect is controlled by the Blue vertex paint channel, observe how each tile reacts to each paint configuration.





Fully Blue is dry, a slight fade to black gives a damp effect, more blotchy black areas gives a puddled look and 100% black is full flood.

Now that this effect is in place, the entire floor will need to be vertex painted to look wet and puddled in a natural way.

This is achieved by hiding most of the scene and leaving the floor visible while I work, so that objects and walls don't get in the way. Seen below is before I started properly painting, with just my experimental paints in place.



Then after a bit of work, I got some good effects and it to look natural.



And a bit of a Lit Preview:



The main complaint about this is that the Vertex Painting Editor does NOT support pen tablet pressure, so I had to set the flow quite low and build up the painting with the mouse gradually to get it to look natural.

Wet Cobbles Material Effect

When I researched using the Reflections demo, I found the water and wet floor effects really interesting, and I figured I could use a similar configuration in my own scene.

I decided to reproduce the wet floor effect, but with using a cobblestones material as the basis.

To get this effect, I first had to convert the Cobbles material I was already using in my scene into a Material Function, which could then be used later with the Water effect.



Then I reproduced the Water reflection effect from the Reflections demo, but replaced the original texture with my new cobbles material function.



This provided the basis of my floor texture, but was only the first step.

Next I had to get the effect onto my floor.

Light Material Function

Because my environment has water reflections in it, I thought it would be useful to create the Light Material Function featured in this tutorial video.

While I didn't end up with the exact same result due to different available assets, I did find a substitute tiling noise texture that worked just as well.

Here is my version of the water ripple Light Material Function:



As you can see, my noise is colour, but it doesn't reduce the effect that I wanted. I'll just have to tweak the colour in the actual light.

I found this information very useful both with creating materials and using material functions in lights.

I decided at a later point that the effect wasn't scattered enough, so I returned to this material and added a few more noise layers and multiple scroll directions to increase the surface scatter to the point I was happy with.