LIGHTING BREAKDOWN OF CRUNCH ARMY (PARAGON ASSETS)

I made this scene for a competition and I haven’t looked at it for a week or so, as I still think I can improve it and change the way I lit it. It is meant to be a still image, so this one uses Unreal Engine and still image lighting approach which isn’t recommended to use for an actual game. Unlike my previous blog about Game Lighting for Compound Map using Unity, which is fully baked, this one is fully real time. Special thanks go to two people who helped me, they wanted to remain unnamed. So with shared credit, let us get a quick overview of my rather overkill method which I probably update and change after writing this blog.

Step 1 – Gather References

The first thing I do is to gather references as this helps establish the overall art direction, mood, style and approach I will be going for. After a whole day of talking to someone about which reference to use, he finally accepted two choices as good lighting reference.

Now, why are there two lighting reference which are totally different from each other? Well, the blue tone one is mostly for composition, while the red one is for the lighting. As I am limited to what other people provide me, I had to compensate by finding an idea of setting up the scene that might be done using existing animation poses, and generally cinematic lighting. So with the general art direction and inspiration in place I went to Step 2.

Step 2 – Setting up scene and composition

The next thing I did was changing the environment a bit, placing out the models, changing the animation poses, creating variety so their silhouette are clear and unique, look like they are running into war and generally using my reference. You see the blue camera hints on my composition, which is essentially what I use as final image. That means I wouldn’t look at this current angle, to decide if the angle is good or bad, I would look through the camera lenses as this is to be a fixed image.

Step 3 – Lighting up the main Crunch character

As mentioned in my first article Lighting Breakdown of Compound Map, I will turn off all lights, including the hidden default lighting such as bloom, ambient occlusion and so on. So the first thing I did was generally follow three point lighting principles by spending a lot of time, placing spot light around Crunch to figure out how to best light him. Of course, Shawn Booth was a great help during the whole process with vitally important feedback.

Step 4 – Rim Lights for Crunch Main

Rim Lighting Crunch Main Character was up next, and I found that to be the hardest part and I still must tweak it. Because Crunch is metal based, have unique shapes to him and reacts different to light I decided to go overboard to get the general rim lighting I wanted since it isn’t meant to be game based however I do recommend placing those rim lights further up, with wider angle to get the desired effect, rather than doing what I did. But for this purpose, it worked fine.

Now, the reason for the rim lights is to separate him from the background more, otherwise you wouldn’t get the perspective and depth. And the reason for blue color choice, besides the reference is to give a nice contrast of color scheme with warm and cold.

Step 5 – Fill Light for Weapon

As you light you will notice that some areas are not getting the desired effect, and if you understand light you know that light bounces and picks up color as it bounces. You will also know that shadow is hardly ever completely black. So after another round of feedback and fresh eyes, I added some shooting effect, lighting, and fill light to blow the weapon up a bit.

The reason for adding specifically red color to the fill lights, is because the weapon is firing, so naturally the fire and effect around it would give out a highlight inside of the barrel, and around the weapon. I continued adding some fill lights around, to get rid of the darkest shadow but also build the silhouette of the character.

Step 6 – Big Fill lights

I needed more fill light and surrounding areas to light up, this give out of picture reasons to where the lights are coming from so I added lights for front to simulate red light from weapons, guns, fire, explosion and strong led lights from back.

By doing so you would see the terrain lit up, and surrounding characters also starting to pick up some light. Giving the character and rest of the characters a more believable light source.

Step 7 – Transferring the principles

It doesn’t make sense that only the main character who is the focal point, gets all the lighting. So, I added some quick lights to the other character using somewhat the same principles. Although, at this stage I would probably redo the rim lighting all together and tweak the values.

The big guy behind was another challenging character with mixed feedback, some didn’t like the pose, others didn’t like him visible and there at all. Regardless, I decided to fill up the light, so he became visible and I changed his model to be more unique from the rest. Important thing to keep in mind is that I tried to ensure that the rim light (blue) and frontal light (red) came from the same direction, which is why I want to redo those rim lights, as right now I don’t find them to fit naturally enough. I also added walls and lit them up to have brighter background once the fog was added.

Step 8 – Atmosphere

I started added in fog effect, to create the mood and dust feeling. I couldn’t get enough control and depth for the army itself, behind the main Crunch character. So I went and did another step.

Step 9 – Fog sheet

I added another layer of fog using fog sheet, to create more depth and color variant in the air. And eventually was ready to play around with the post effect for the camera.

Step 10 – Post Effects

With color adjustment, tone mapping, ambient occlusion, depth of field, adding particle effects and water effects around water. I eventually called it finished but at this stage I might revisit to make some changes.

Maybe you can learn more if you read my previous blog where I lit up a map for Intruder game. Which is a different process and fully baked. Here

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