#character lighting

For our fourth assignment, I was honestly a little scared. When the idea that we would have to work on lighting techniques in realtime, including having to jump right into Unreal Engine 4 without any past knowledge, I was petrified at the thought of touching something that I knew from the start wasn't going to go smoothly. Most of my peers were going towards lightning environments, and since I've always had a more keen interest in characters themselves, I decided to follow through with that notion. I was scrounging around and managed to stumble upon a character know as Gideon, from the, unfortunately, shutdown game: Paragon.

Paragon Wiki. (2019). Gideon. [online] Available at: https://paragon.fandom.com/wiki/Gideon [Accessed 27 Oct. 2019]. Although around this time I already had the character model selected and downloaded, I still didn't have a clue as to what I was going to do, so in my field of work there is a fix for this, and the solution is to simply browse the internet with simple correlations towards what you want to create. After a few hours I managed to land upon a video with not that many views, a video showing a young female posing with a relaxed face whilst a circular light would constantly rotate and move around her, and when I grasped the fact that she was barely moving and yet her expression was being completely deformed and changed, simply by the positioning of the light itself, for me this was something that I found extremely interesting due to the fact that something so simple could have such an enormous impact.

The effect a rotating light source has on a face. 2015). [online] acdcman96fin Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7Ga1cn6hT8 [Accessed 27 Oct. 2019]. Having seen such a great example of what lighting could do I decided on what I wanted to do, I was going to grab Gideon and light him in two different ways, the same position and pose, but different lights. Good and evil, whilst this could be determined by someone’s actions, I decided to take it into account that lighting could do the same effect without having to change the character's design in any way. After a few hair-pulling hours of trying to figure out how to use the basics of unreal engine 4, I managed to compose myself enough to get something half-decent out, and so the first lighting effect was to use somewhat warm colors, those that could leave someone relaxed and at ease, almost like a sunset on a cozy afternoon, and that is what I believe this first image represents. Since I’m from Portugal, we have beautiful weather, allowing us to enjoy the sunsets cloaking our entire beaches, and reminding us of our happiest childhood memories, where nothing would seem to keep us down or bother us.

Whilst the second image is using the exact same model in the exact same position, something has truly taken a toll for the dark, this once calm-faced man is now obscured by his good, now we have no idea what he looks like, whether on not he is angry or vicious-looking, for me, it transcribes fear quite swiftly. For me, the moment that we do not know what could happen, and to be filled with uncertainty, can be even worse than actually being presented a bad situation, some would say that they would prefer “just to get it over with” since they cannot stand the anxiety of waiting for the inevitable, and this is exactly how I feel in many unwanted situations.