[1] Light & Shadows

Week 5 – Developing Skills

This week’s assignment is about light and shadows, chiaroscuro, the balance (or lack of it) between what’s visible and what is hidden. It is an excellent opportunity to play with lighting in Unreal Engine and practice what I have learnt so far about it.

While browsing the UE marketplace I noticed an asset that was looking good, but perhaps missed a little depth when it came to lighting. The assets seemed to be thin and I wanted to try to make the scene look more realistic.

I decided to add the Mediterranean Rustic Interior level to a UE5 project I had and start working on it. As usual, I removed all lighting, switched to lumen and started from scratch.

Mediterranean Rustic Interior by Jaime Perez (original design)

I converted all the static meshes to nanite and started looking at a basic look that I liked by moving the directional light and let the light shine through the window. I liked the idea of having the light bouncing off the table of a morning summer day in a Mediterranean town.

I based my lighting on images that I found on a website called PlaygroundAI.com using the prompt  “mediterranean street scene with flowers”. The images had bright and saturated colours that I liked and wanted to reproduce for this lighting work. Example image below:

A number of potted plants in front of a building by Martin Montañez – (AI Generated image used as a colour reference for this project)

Once I had established my main lighting style, I started adding more light into the scene with rect lights for the overall look of the scene, spot and point lights for the lamps. I wanted the scene to look realistic and dreamy. Once I finished adding lights, I started replacing some the static mesh materials and adding imperfection and dust that I picked up from the Megascan collection.

Here below is my final result for the day and night cycle:

Here is a link to the pictures also available in black and white: Light & Shadow – Day and Night

References:

Perez, J. (2020) Mediterranean Rustic Interior Available at: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/mediterranean-rustic-interior?sessionInvalidated=true (Accessed 17 Jan 2024)

Montañez, M. (2023) A number of potted plants in front of a building Available at: https://playgroundai.com/search?q=Take+a+close-up+shot+of+a+typical+white+street+in+a+Mediterranean+village+on+a+sunny+summer+day (Accessed 17 Jan 2024)