Lighting Assignment

 

Right SO! I ALSO fought for my life for this project too. I've restarted this project twice because for whatever reason unreal didn't want to save and NOW I can't upload it to perforce and its due in exactly 58 minutes. :)  (I shouldn't have waited till the last minute to turn it in sooooo... never doing that again lol) SO! Here is my blog post and my lil screenshots to at least turn in something. Will I have to restart for a 3rd time? Who knows! Perhaps I will, and another part of my soul will die. I'll let update and let y'all know! 

I've been fighting for my life this whole week and I know that I'll be fighting for my life for AT LEAST the rest of this week. I'm so tired and I really want a Jimmy Deans breakfast croissant sandwich. Idk, we've had really bad luck this week. My evil eye BROKE. You know it's bad when the evil eye breaks. BUT I digress. Let me get into my process because that's the whole point of this blog post lol.

SO! Look! Isn't to so pretty? I was going for the dock at sunset. I first followed the video lecture that Nitin had posted so I could get all of my settings right, and then I downloaded a specifically a coastal sunset HDRI from Poly Haven. I then looked at a couple reference images to get the vibe down. I love golden hour. Remember in like 2016 when we would all wait for golden hour to take those aesthetic selfies? No? Just me? Okay.

Anyhoo, I migrated the fantasy props pack from my other project and then I downloaded some pirates and some fire VFX from the asset library and I went to work! For the lanterns, I added the fire VFX into it and then I lowered the intensity and then I added a warm point light so it would cast shadows and emanate from the lantern. I really wanted to capture the pink and orange colors that you see during sunset so I made my HDRI a light pink color and I made my directional light a vibrant orange and then I messed around with the brightness and exposure of both of the lights until I ended up with something I was happy with. I also messed around with the rotation of the directional light so it would look more like sunset because you're not going to have sunset with a sun that is pointing down directly on the scene. That's high noon. 

I really like the way it turned out and I overall had fun with lighting; even though I think I'm so much better at lighting in Maya/Blender but perhaps I can get good at lighting in engine too. If I have to restart for a 3rd time, it may look better than this! Ya know practice makes perfect. :/

Update: I had to restart it :)