March 2019

amit In Breakdown

Lighting Breakdown – Reflection Scene

Inspiration

This time I went for general inspiration and I ended up with these two images. What you will notice is that they do not reflect the final lighting. This is because I used the grayscale and general idea of it, rather than copying it.

Image from the book mentioned on the image above.

Turning inspiration to BW

Turning Inspiration to Opposite Color

Setting up Basic Lighting

I then set up the basic lighting in which we want as few light as possible to maximize the effect, range and intensity. I also wanted the middle light to have the blue and strongest light intensity. And the outer areas to have a orange weaker light to them.

Tweaking Shadow

I didn’t want my usual sharp shadows. I wanted them a bit more diffused so I adjusted the source radius on all.

Key Light as Area Light

I used area light for the key light to get diffused shadow but also a nice soft effect overall to the scene.

Reflections

I tweaked the reflections to get the desired reflection out of the whole area, including ground. For the ground I use planar reflection.

Skylight

I didn’t want too much bright light coming in from skylight, so I kept it to the minimum using the cubemap.

Fog

I then added some orange fog to emphasize the mood and spread the light around a bit.

Key light Color Test

It was important to get the basic color right, intensity and range of the key light. Which as mentioned earlier was an area light.

Camera Angle

I started tweaking the camera angle to decide the composition, depth of field and other features.

Post Process

During all this I also tweaked the post process to pump up the desired effect.

Light complexity

These days I like to check the light complexity to optimize the scene a bit. This is why there are so few lights on this scene.

Lightmap Density

I also bumped up the lightmap density to get more out of the quality, but not too high.

GPU Visualizer

And to ensure the optimization is at its best I check the GPU Visualizer. I try my best to keep the numbers low which means the ms cost and fps is optimized.

Final Shots

amit In Breakdown

Lighting Breakdown – Scifi Bunk

Reference/Color Wheel

The first thing I did was look for general references that could work for me. And after that I decided to create a colour palette that I think might be interesting to do. This scene is popular to light, so I wanted to use colours that were less popular. For that reason, I went with teal, purple and yellow/orange.

Color Wheel

Greyscale Lighting

Grey Scale

My preferred way of lighting is to get the greyscale the way I want it. So I focus on where the light should come from, where is it hitting and generally ensuring that the values from light to dark is clear.

Deciding on Color

Once I have an idea I go back and forth deciding where the color should be for what, its intensity and range.

Lighting Color Mode

Shadows

As the process continues I start looking at the darkness and which method to use to remove complete blackness when viewed with materials on.

Lighting With Material

Post Processing

Post Processed

For this particular scene I decided to lean on stationary light a bit, and use post processing volume to bring out the light using exposure and global illumination.

IES Profile

I would adjust the IES profile to get the desired effect, which meant changing intensity and range to deal with the changes that came with using IES profile.

IES Profile

Shadow Length/Shadow Bias

Certain stationary lights where not giving contact shadow and it took me some time to realize I had to adjust Contact Shadow Length. For the movable lights I adjusted Shadow Bias.

Contact Shadow Length

Detail Lights

For the few detail lights I prefer using movable lights, and those tend to be added to a different lighting channel to save resources. Additionally, I will turn off shadow if possible. This makes moveable much cheaper to use.