This week I stopped fighting the software and started working with it. I understood that this was going to be part of the process of picking up this new program but I’m glad the battle is over. Another thing that helped me was to move away from baked lighting and into dynamic lighting rendered in real-time. This greatly reduced the time I had to wait between changing settings and, in turn, the amount of frustration experienced when something wasn’t going my way. It also provided an opportunity to more quickly get familiar with the settings for these types of lights.
As I started to find some flow the lights I also wanted to add some more dynamic aspects to the scene so I started researching how to create a day night cycle. In order to do this I had to venture into the Blueprint functionality of UE4. I feel fortunate to have some patch programming experience from Max MSP so the transition into the editor in Unreal wasn’t too bad. This seems to be a common task in a lot of different games so I was able to find some great tutorials on the topic. This was also the time where I wanted to explore more global illumination in my scene. The GI I was getting from the baked lights was beautiful and including wonderful indirect lighting of the space. As soon as I switched over to dynamic lights that was lost and I was kind of confused. After some more research I found out about Light Propagation Volumes and the ability to turn this experimental feature in the config file. It seems to work perfectly so I’m not sure why it’s not out of beta yet. Additionally, I was able to create a photorealistic texture for my cardboard components using photos of the actual material and the free software Materialize.
Here are some screenshots from the current iteration of the space:
My next step is to figure out how to get more realistic shadows with the dynamic lights and I’ve found some great information from the Fortnite creators about Mesh Distance Fields and Cascaded Shadow maps. I’ve found my homework for the weekend!
In watching this video I felt a reassurance that there is a lot more me to learn when it comes to game engines and even in just the topic of lighting. I think this video does a wonderful job of informing other artists on best practices used in the video game industry in order to push the capabilities of the engine and deliver great content. I don’t think that the application of this knowledge will ever be in the same vein as this content however I feel like the information is extremely useful across many different instances.
This week I also stumbled on a 3D artist while perusing the web, The French Monkey. While it looks like he mainly works in C4D, the work that he is creating is super inspiring, especially the new texture work he is doing. The ability to create such different looks just using textures and a sphere is incredible! I feel like as soon as this big project is over I can get lost in trying to recreate some of the work on this site in order to develop more of my 3D skills.