Brief 4: Light and Shadows (Aryan Raj Adhikari)

Figure 1 (Saloon color render, 2024)

Figure 2 (Saloon noir render, 2024)

This was a fairly fast assignment compared to the previous 4 briefs, but this assignment in my opinion has been the most technical one as we deal with lighting in our everyday life, and to be able to replicate that on a 3D program and simulate lighting that's similar to real life is really difficult. If possible, I would like to use those assets to create a new saloon set by kitbashing and create an intricate system of lighting that uses spotlights, point lights and cleverly incorporates post process volume in it.

I think the assignment is not up to the standards of professional industry light artists, however, I do feel like I did use a lot of principles carefully when lighting the scene. I also color graded the scene entirely in Unreal Engine itself but I still feel as though I can improve upon it even more.

This was a really fun assignment and this allowed me to use my creativity and my theory to the maximum to bring out 2 decent renders for this brief.

Figure 3 (An in game picture of a saloon in RDR2, 2024)

REFERENCES:

After the assets were imported on the new level, I decided to work on the lighting as it was super basic and lacked a bit of flair.

I decided to add a post process volume to the prebuilt set. Since, I didn't want it to affect the entire level, I increased its scale so that only the prebuilt set gets affected by the cube volume.

Figure 1 (Adding a postprocess volume, 2024)

I then selected the emissive planes and decided to change their base color so as to influence how much lighting I wanted from the planes for the scene.

Figure 2 (Changing the color of emissive plane, 2024)

I increased the size of the emissive plane and lined it outside the saloon so that it projects lighting from the doorway and the windows. I then arranged the layout of the scene as follows.

I also changed the base color of the emissive plane to give them an orangish classic wild west tint.

Figure 3 (Arranging the emissive plane, 2024)

The raytraced shadows for the planes are enabled inside the material graph. Raytraced data provides very high visual quality for the shadows to be casted by the emissive plane onto the scene.

Figure 4 (Raytraced shadows, 2024)

I then tweaked different properties inside the post process volume cube so that I could saturate the scene more and create a color still render worthy for the lighting that I envisioned.

After that, I decided to opt for a black and white noir style look. it's a really popular and cool technique that they use in the classic game 'Saboteur'. They use areas coded black and white to show the Nazi hold and the areas get filled with color and vigor if they are uprooted.

Figure 5 (Saboteur color, 2024)

Figure 6 (Saboteur black and white, 2024)

I now tried to emulate the same black and white noir color template to my scene by tweaking the color properties from the post process volume.

I achieved a noir black and white look by color grading the scene with the help of post process volume. I enabled the temperature type to white balance and decreased the tint to -1.0 and maximized the temperature to 15000.0. I then decreased the RGB values of saturation to 0, 0, 0.

Figure 7 (Colorgrading post process volume, 2024)

I also enabled the screen color tint to change the RGB color of the entire level.

Figure 8 (Screen color tint, 2024)

I changed the base color of the emissive plane to a darker shade and adjusted the perspective of the camera to click a still render image for the new noir setup.

Figure 9 (Emissive noir plane, 2024)

Figure 10 (Camera perspective, 2024)

REFERENCES:

I researched for free asset packs for Unreal Engine, that was already prebuilt so I could tweak the lighting properties and render out 2 still images, one of color and one black and white. I found an asset pack exactly as I had envisioned, an asset pack for classic wild west saloons.

I added the asset pack to the level from the Fab website as the assets in Quixel Bridge have been migrated over to Fab.

Figure 1 (Adding it to library, 2024)

Inside Unreal Engine, I created a new level and added the asset pack to the level.

Figure 2 (Creating a new level, 2024)

After adding all the assets, I was wondering if I would have to construct a saloon from scratch with the assets available. However, there were already 2 prebuilt saloons with the assets created. I chose one of the set to test my lighting knowledge on.

Figure 3 (Prebuilt saloon set, 2024)

This was the 4th brief assignment of the semester and it was a really particular assignment in that it had much to do with the lighting composition of the digital artefacts that we would work with. For this assignment, we were given the go ahead by our lecturer to use prebuilt environment scenes and tweak the lighting properties.

I was a bit stunned as to what to do for the assignment but then I remember being in love with those classic wild west movies from where I drew an inspiration to download a prebuilt saloon map, import it to Unreal Engine and try to emulate the wild west color.

I went online and grabbed as many references as I could in terms of the wild west saloon and stashed it all together in a PureRef file.

Figure 1 (References collected in PureRef file, 2024)

I think I would have loved to create all of the assets that belong in a classic old wild west saloon and built an interior level all by myself, but I don't feel that I would have sufficient time required to complete the assignment. I might choose this as one of the major assignment to further develop upon but I haven't given it much thought as of now.

REFERENCES:

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