Prelude & My Journey
This past summer I had the luckiest opportunity to discover the art of real-time lighting through Peter Tran's course on CGMA (I wouldn't be here without your guidance and support, thank you so much Peter!)
Starting from a curiosity to explore and learn more about Unreal 5 and Lumen, I quickly learned just how impactful lighting is in the creation of a great game environment: the way we can communicate atmosphere, emotions, and even storytelling through just the effect of light itself is just so beautiful to me.
I learned that all those beautiful sceneries I used to love from Dark Souls, The Last of Us, Nier:Automata, Genshin Impact, and recently It Takes Two, are actually all influenced heavily by the lighting done in-game!! Ever since then, I've fell in love with this craft.
great inspirations:
some of my favorite screenshots taken from the games I mentioned (I love taking screenshots in game, almost too many lol it was very hard to choose)
copyright reserved to the creators at FromSoftware, PlatinumGames, and Hazelight Studios.
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My most recent piece done was a lighting study done on a gothic environment. It is created as a tribute to the Soulsborne universe, which is my favorite game series of all time. I was hoping to finally be able to recreate the scenes I've loved so much :). I spent the most time on this piece and used a lot of the lighting techniques I've learned, so I thought it would also be best to do a detailed breakdown on this one. I hope you guys enjoy!!!
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Process Breakdown
Gathering Inspirations & Concept Art & References
I usually first start off a piece by some inspirations or concept art I really like. I like to scroll through art station environment art & concept art section a lot, and whenever I come across something with an atmosphere or color palette I really like I will add it to a collection to be referenced later on.
For this piece, I wanted to recreate the Soulsborne vibes, so I looked up keywords surrounding the Soulsborne universe, Diablo, and dark fantasy environment stuff. After couple hours of researching, I narrowed down the selections down to a collection of around 20 concept art that has the atmosphere and colors I really like and fit the soulsborne universe. I would group them into categories in PureRef:
Selecting Environment
At this point after understanding the vibe I may go for, I start researching into unreal marketplace and artstation marketplace looking for a fitting environment to be used. I decided early on that I would go for a high-res realistic environment since that's what Soulsborne games are. I also made sure that the environment is UE5 compatible. In the end I decided to go with the lumen and nanite enabled Gothic Megapack by Meshingun Studio. It was very much out of my budget but it was also the most excellent choice of all. After some more research, I decided to go with it since the high quality environment and assets may be reused later for anything. I do love gothic environments too much ;-;
Narrowing Down Colorkey Reference
Generally, for a more open piece I would skip this step and start gathering some more references of similar architectures and different times of day for lighting in each potential scenario, but since this piece is done practicing for a colorkey matching lighting pipeline workflow, I decided to further narrow down the references and find just three I like the best to focus on and try to match it to them as close as I can. I ended up with:
Setting Up UE5 with Lumen
After this, I proceed to start a new UE5 project and go into the project settings tab and enable lumen with the following setting, make sure to have virtual shadow maps turned on and when available the "use hardware ray tracing" button. This will allow UE5 to give generally the best quality for performance.
Key Lights & Sky
Going into the environment, I would first delete all the old lighting the map had and reset the post processing volume. It would then look something like this:
In lit mode it will be just completely dark besides other special effects like torches if the previous step is done correctly! If it the environment had baked light make sure to re-bake so no residual light effects will remain.
After this, I would then proceed choose the best skybox/HDRI to use for the lighting scenario, in this case I went with a matte painted skybox by Velarion. I liked a bit of the hand painted feel to the skybox, they are also more dramatic which will be perfect for imitating the Soulsborne vibe. I then would start adding in the skybox, swapping in and out until I find the best base to go with. I then would start tweaking around the brightness, contrast, and tint parameters until it matches closely with the reference's sky.
After, I would block in the levels with the foundational directional light (aka sunlight) and skylight (these are the lights reflected by the atmosphere as they pass through it, so it will typically contain the color of the atmosphere itself [blue sky = blue skylight]). The skylight is very useful for illuminating parts of the meshes that the sun can't reach, giving it an ambience light effect. After dropping the lights into the scene, I would then just play around with them, tweaking all the fun parameters like altering the direction of the light source, tint/temperature and intensity of the directional light and skylight until I get something I like that is close to the reference:
At this stage I will go in and create a bunch of cinematic cameras with 16:9 DSLR filmback and adjust the aperture to match the in-game exposure. I would then fly around in the scene and find the best places of the environment to focus on and their corresponding best camera angle that creates a great composition. Then I will start focus on refining and adding details to the shots from there. In this example, I chose a camera angle containing architectural structures closely resembling the Tristram cathedral reference (I can imagine the red lights coming through the doorways and have the moon lit above the towers):
Contact Light & Fill Light (Define focal points)
After having identified the main camera angles to work with, I start going in to add more lights to refine the focal points and match the reference.
Here I tried to illuminate the focal point of the castle towers by adding in some cold point lights. The focal points in lighting is very crucial because not only do we want the piece itself to be pleasant, we want to make sure that the player in-game have a sense of direction and know what the important/next location they should head to:
For the next focal point of the ominous red lights emitting from within the castles, I started focusing blocking them out using point lights with very saturated red. Here the ominous red lights stand out so much from the rest, it will be very clear to the player that they should probably check the inside out :)
Volumetric Exponential Height Fog
Afterwards I will start focusing on adding the crucial volumetric exponential height fog (it is so important for creating volume and atmosphere to your scene, literally :P). In this case I wanted to push the overall reds a bit more so I added a volumetric fog with a warm albedo, I again played around with the parameters including the intensity of the fog, inscattering color, scattering distribution, extinction scale and others until it looks good:
Floating Fog
Then it comes the time to add more special effects! The volumetric fog is for mostly the atmosphere but not the "visible fogs" that lies around the scene that we first imagine, so we need to add in these fogs manually ourselves. For this example I went with a simple blueprint fog-card found in the Unreal Blueprint Demo Level.
I again did two different passes, one with the cold fogs and another with warm, tweaking around the parameters of the color, brightness, size of the fog and duplicating and distributing them across the scene to match the reference and the scene:
Special Effects & Actors
Then it comes to the step to add the moon (our actual key player hahah). I first started first with a very simple emissive sphere:
I then found a realistic moon texture; I faked the effects of the moon surface by very simply doing a displacement based glow map in the material editor:
After jumping into Photoshop a bunch of times adjusting the displacement map's distribution and exposure to make sure the dark spots of the moon are visible, I hopped back into Unreal and tweaked a bit more the glow and color parameters of the moon, here is what we have:
Post Processing Volume & Last Adjustments (Rim light and God-ray)
At this last stage, I would take a close look back at the reference and do the last passes to ensure that our environment look as close as possible to it! Note that if you feel like you can improve upon the 2D concept art a bit feel in some area free to go off it as well.
I noticed that the moonglow is not nearly strong enough and the edge is a bit too visible, to compensate for this I decided to add in a strong bloom. Note that this also makes the overall scene a bit too bright, but don't worry we can change this later!
I then ran a few posts to colorgrade the shot, mainly just the gain for shadow and saturation for midtone (as much as I love the color in the sky, it looks too saturated compared to the reference):
I also noticed the illuminations on the towers are not as strong as the reference, and that I should strengthen the red lights on the tower to reinforce the focal point a bit more. I chose to use couple spot lights on the tower and used a god-ray blueprint card in the tower:
Last but not least, to match the dark Soulsborne vibe and strengthen the focal point even better, I added a vignette filter, it is a pretty big change right? The bloom effect on everything doesn't seem to be too distracting anymore!
The End
So here is the final screenshot we will have for this shot compared to the reference (I changed the color to be a bit more saturated and purplish since I think it fits the scene even better):
For the rest of this project, I would repeat the same above process but for refining all the other parts of the key parts of the environment. At last I would do a run-through of the map as a whole in-game to make sure no other part is broken (too dark, too saturated, etc) as a result and that the player gets a good experience throughout and knows generally where they should be going.
That's it! I left out some of the playing around and the iterative improvements process (aka finding all the unpleasant parts and changing things make them look better), but these are the main process I generally follow each time and I recorded all the big key changes I made.
Thank you so much!!! I really hope you learned something from this and maybe got inspired to do some lighting of your own as well!!
And if you wanna see the full Fallen Palace lighting project itself it is over here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Qn3EdE. And my portfolio is here if you want to check out the other lighting projects I have done: https://www.artstation.com/xiaocongyan.
See you around :)