#assignment4

ITERATION 1: 1 PT PERSPECTIVAL ELEVATION WITHOUT SURFACE DRAWING TEXTURE

ITERATION 1: PLAN (TOP VIEW) WITHOUT SURFACE DRAWING TEXTURE

ITERATION 1: WALL ISOMETRIC WITHOUT SURFACE DRAWING TEXTURE

Look at the work of Romare Bearden in Revel or online. He created collages that combine media (gouache, pencil, colored pencil) and photographs to express things from his life that he thought people could universally relate to. He was representing himself powerfully long before the advent of selfies.

What are you fascinated by in your daily life? Create a self-portrait that somehow represents YOU. This could be a selfie (remember this is ART - your representation should encompass the definition as introduced in our text, and this is a graded assignment), a virtual collage, anything you assemble that communicates something to the viewer. But don’t let me (or anyone else) limit you – be as creative as you desire! Think about HOW your self-portrait will elevate the viewer's understanding of the subject = you.

Now it was time to start creating my own cinematic lighting. I had not accessed Unreal Engine’s FAB assets before and it had been a while since I have used Unreal, so this was a great project for me to re-familiarise myself with the software, as well as developing my skills. To begin my practical lighting experiments I downloaded a Metta Human character from the Unreal Engine marketplace, and imported her into a copy of the Metta Human Unreal project, to have all the materials set up ready (Renzo Palmisano, 2024). 

I then created a new scene and started first with a simplistic 3 point lighting set up, including a spotlight for my key light, and rects for the bounce and rim, to simulate soft box lighting which created softer shadows with a natural feel. I used one stationary cinematic camera to capture all my results from the same perspective, to emphasise more the changes lighting can bring to a scene. I spent a lot of the development time in this view trying to get things looking good from a set perspective. To do this, I added pivot actors as parents to the lights, visible within this view, so I could easily rotate them around my Metta Human’s head easily. After my attempt at natural indoor lighting, I moved onto creating something more dramatic, but realistic. This includes a bright, warm candle light, from below my character's eyeline, and a variation with cold harsh split lighting.

For my moodier, stylized images, I took inspiration from photography portraits and tried to mimic some of the lighting techniques, using saturated colours, not limited to a light temperature. I used contrasts of cool and warm colours on each side of the face, emphasizing my model’s form, while adding visual depth and interest. Our eyes are drawn to colour contrast, utilising these colour variations creates an immediate focal point for our eyes, additionally creating undertones of unease and conflict with contrasting warm and cold sides.

I focused on achieving these results purely with lights, rather than relying on post processing to fix any visual issues. It took me a while to get familiar with Unreal Engine again, but I am happy with my results, and feel I have learnt a lot about different styles of lighting, and the importance of presentation conveying narratives.

Reference List

Renzo Palmisano (2024) Mastering Classic Portrait Lighting Techniques in Unreal Engine 5.5.1. 30 December. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZg0WkmtX1g&t=3879s (Accessed: 29 October 2025).

Epic Games (2025) Unreal Engine 2025 (Version 5.6.0) [Computer program]. Available at: https://www.unrealengine.com/ (Accessed: 30 October 2025).

https://uk.pinterest.com/ (2025) (Accessed: 30 October 2025).

After taking time to research and enhance my understanding, I took the time to study the lighting in some character art cinematic trailers, and outstanding portfolio renders, to see the theory in action, and understand techniques they have used to make their characters read so well. Good portrait lighting gives shape to the subject's appearance, highlighting contours, textures and depth. While also evoking emotions, mood, visual interest and narrative.

League of legends frequently releases cinematic trailers, with a focus on promoting new characters. Below is a thumbnail from their ‘Warriors’ Trailer (League of Legends, 2020, 2:44), a promotional cinematic. The lighting artists have created a high value contrast in the facial area, drawing the audience to the characters emotions, a calm steady expression, seasoned and battle ready. She has a cool blue and purple bounce and ambient light, and is illuminated from the background, her soft glow could suggest she’s a savior. The terminal line creates a soft curve across Kai’sa’s face, highlighting her delicate features and is relatively harsh - potentially reflecting the challenges she’s facing.

Apex Legends similarly produces cinematic character based trailers, here is the thumbnail from “Official Lifeline Cinematic Trailer (Stories from the Outlands),(Apex Legends, 2022, 1:33). Similarly the highest value of contrast is at the character's face, and the keylight above the character's eye illuminates her Rembrandt’s triangle. This lighting is a lot more one sided, having a main key light on the right, with several bounce, and secondary lights from the left, gently illuminating her shadow. The Terminal line here is incredibly sharp, creating very one sided lighting, but the rim light brings her forward from the dark background. She is moving into the light, while always being separated from the darkness, this angelic lighting foreshadows hope.

Reference List

League of Legends (2020) Warriors | Season 2020 Cinematic - League of Legends (ft. 2WEI and Edda Hayes). 7 January. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR-KAldshAE

(Accessed: 29 October 2025).

Apex Legends (2022) Apex Legends - Official Lifeline Cinematic Trailer (Stories from the Outlands). 14 June. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUcDwSH39yk (Accessed: 29 October 2025).

Kutskir, T (2025) Photopea. Available at: https://www.photopea.com/ (Accessed: 30 October 2025).

A large part of character art is being able to effectively present your work, whether that be in a portfolio, a game trailer or other promotional material. So this week I have decided to spend my time learning and practicing the basics of character lighting in Unreal Engine.

My aims are:

To grasp the differences between stylized and realistic lighting techniques

To understand the importance of capturing mood with lighting

To effectively make use of colour with lighting

To start off, I did some research on key lighting principles and theory to re-familiarise myself and deepen my knowledge. This involved reading lighting blogs, Wall (2023), Naghdi (2025), Katatikarn (2024), and watching a variety of youtube tutorials and lectures, Blender Guru (2019), EZ Unreal (2023), Josh Toonen (2023), J Hill (2022). Having a solid understanding of lighting in the real world is crucial for making my renders look believable, and so was also a large focus of my research.

I learnt that one of the most common techniques in lighting a character is the use of ‘3 Point Lighting’ - which consists of a key light, fill light and rim light. This is a simplistic technique that adds dimension to a model quickly and easily while making use of a variety of shadows and highlights. Another common technique is utilising upstage lighting - here, keeping the key light above the eyeline is advisable, so the light always gives ‘rembrandt lighting’ - a dramatic triangle under the eye on the shadow side of the face.

Other common types of lighting I want to explore include:

‘Butterfly Lighting’ -  which resembles a butterfly shape under the nose, highlights cheekbones and creates an elegant, symmetrical, flattering look, and glamorous appearance. This is achieved with a high front facing light, well above the eyeline.

‘Loop Lighting’ forms when you bring your Butterfly light down a bit, which creates a small shadow from the nose which curves down forming a loop. This type of lighting is good for natural portraits, as it adds a soft depth to the face. 

‘Split Lighting’ is used to create high contrast and dramatic tension, it splits the face into two halves of light and dark, with a key light on a chosen side of the model's face. This is often used in horror portraits, or more experimental photography.

Finally ‘Rim Lighting’, which I’ve already mentioned as being a light within 3 Point and Upstage lighting, can also be used purely on its own, to highlight a subject's silhouette against a dark or busy background. Likewise used in dramatic or scary situations.

All of these techniques can also be used in tandem with including a bounce, and rim light, to soften the areas in shadow. When adding any light to a scene, there are many aspects that need to be considered to achieve the desired look. This is a short summary of what I’ve learnt this week, and will aim to incorporate into my future work:

Intensity, size and direction, directly correlate to what is illuminated, and to what extent. Point lights, spotlights  and rect lighting all have distinct characteristics that will result in different attributes of the above. Spot lights can create intense light in specific areas, whereas rect lighting can simulate large studio panels used in the real world, to reflect subtle diffused illumination onto a model. 

Temperature of the light source directly correlates to the colour, transitioning from white being neutral, to a cool blue for cold lights, or warm red/orange glow for hot. Very warm lighting can easily become overly saturated on skin tones, so should be used sparingly, but will elicit a feeling of comfort, contrary to cool light, which are more often used in scary situations

Increasing the size of a light can give the shadows a softer feel - likewise the smaller the light, the harsher the shadows.

The ‘Shadow Line’, also known as the ‘Terminator’, or ‘Bedbug Line’ on an artifact, is where light transitions into shadow, often on the edge of a form. This transition zone between areas of light and dark is really useful for demonstrating/exaggerating the form of an object. Terminators are gradual or sharper depending on the softness of the main light

In larger scenes, lighting can feel more natural and believable when you see the source of lights, aka torches or candles giving context.

Like in all aspects of art, values are especially important. Lighting can be used to adjust values, to bring attention to key points of a scene. Such as bringing the character’s face or eyes forward away from the background.

Reference List

J Hill(2022) Rendering Characters in Unreal Engine 5 | Tutorial. 6 July. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqGlyhPXy5A&t=1793s (Accessed: 30 October 2025).

Josh Toonen(2023) The #1 Skill You NEED For Lighting in UE5. 6 June. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAz4Lb93gwY (Accessed: 30 October 2025).

EZ Unreal (2023) (Easy Way) How to Import Metahuman into Unreal Engine 5. 15 June. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3H7pHTArkaU (Accessed: 30 October 2025).

Blender Guru (2019) Lighting Course. 29 March. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys4793edotw&list=PLjEaoINr3zgH9vCr47kSS5W8PEJBNIiwK (Accessed: 29 October 2025).

Katatikarn, J. (2024) Character Lighting: How to Choose the Right Light for Your Character (2024). Available at: https://academyofanimatedart.com/character-lighting/ (Accessed: 30 October 2025).

Naghdi, A. (2025) The Ultimate Guide to Lighting Fundamentals for 3D. Available at: https://dreamfarmstudios.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-lighting-fundamentals-for-3d/ (Accessed: 30 October 2025).

After looking at Journey and Little Nightmares, I started thinking about what theme I wanted to use for this assignment.

While thinking about it, I read the information the teacher gave us about this light and shadow assignment.

It hit me that I have a thing for black-and-white and intense light. So, I decided to go with that as the theme for this project.

I usually start by creating a general worldview and characters before I can visualize the related images and story. So, first, I made a dead character.

The most distinctive feature of this character is the red strip of cloth on his face. I got the idea from an Asian psychic ritual called "Guan Lu Yin." The main idea of this ritual is that an experienced cleric can lead the person tied with the red cloth to find the person he wants to see in the underworld.

I thought about it in reverse and came up with a dead person who can return to the human world as a ghost to see his family and friends still alive through the ritual.

This character has some interesting details:

The red cloth is a living creature.

The wings on his back allow him to fly around the afterlife.

To activate the red cloth, letters and photos burned by relatives and friends are necessary.

Finally, the ankle ring on the character is another intriguing feature. It represents:

An obsession with staying in the afterlife, meaning the character cannot truly "die."

A tool to help the character return to the human world.

The ankle rings have a unique function:

The right ankle shows the time of the character's death.

The left ankle displays the time the character can return to.

However, there's a catch: the character can only return to a world where he is still alive. He cannot visit the world where he died.

So, based on this character and worldview, I wanted to create a world in this gray area between the human and afterlife worlds.

It's a zone with no rules, so you might see strange buildings that don't make sense physically, water flowing down from the sky, and plates floating in the sky.

But really, this space is a world made up of the dead's memories and experiences, all amplified by the moment's emotions.

Ultimately, I decided to go with this image as the one I want to keep working on. It may look messy, but it's packed with ideas I want to get out there. First, there's the square plate floating in the air with intense light.

That's a photo of a deceased person's life, and the image is projected onto the floor. I imagined the effect to be like that of Teamlab, a famous light and shadow exhibition in Tokyo. It has photos of the deceased floating in space, and there's also a clock in the air to show the passing of time. I wanted to use this image to convey the feeling of running lights in one's head at certain moments.

I found the last part of the assignment interesting, but it was also the worst. I had to use different colors in the same image to create different emotions in the scene.

I think it's a fascinating experiment to figure out the best color for the scene, but since I don't know much about color and the structure of the scene, I'm not that happy with the final result.

There are a few reasons for this. First, I'm not familiar with drawing spotlight-like lighting effects. Second, in the beginning, I only had black-and-white images in my mind, so I didn't know how to add colors to the light and shadow.

This assignment opened my eyes to the power of light and shadow and showed me how far I have to go in mastering them. I plan to improve by drawing more photos with intense light and shadow.

Reference

Yahoo News (n.d.) 還願：觀落陰到底是什麼？危險嗎？ Available at: https://tw.news.yahoo.com/還願-觀落陰到底是什麼-危險嗎-060053705.html (Accessed: [4 January 2025]).

teamLab (n.d.) Impermanent Life: People Create Space and Time, at the Confluence of Their Spacetime New, Reversible Rotation – Continuous. Available at: https://www.teamlab.art/w/impermanent-life-people/#modal-1 (Accessed: [4 January 2025]).