My main work this week is the design of scene objects. Since the game project is in cartoon style, the objects I design should not be too complicated. It should be a condensed summary of a model. It can be clarified in another easy-to-understand way: We can judge the good or bad of the design by looking at the silhouette of the model. The shape of cartoon props should be more exaggerated, it contains the designer’s understanding of the shape and structure of objects.
References
It is necessary to refer to before designing. I searched a lot of pictures of cartoon rocks and marine plants to provide inspiration at once.
In addition, in the process of designing plants and rocks, I found a good example, as shown in the picture above. The design drawing includes the size of the plant and the details of the material. Such a design drawing helps increase the understanding of objects in the modeling and texturing phases.
Plents and rock 2D concept
This is the first draft of my plents. Obviously, the color of the plants is not uniform. But for so many plants, color design is still quite difficult. My solution to this is to first control the hue of the object roughly between light blue and pink. Then write the material shader in Unreal, and unify the colors of the plants in Unreal.
As the artist of the project, I am also responsible for the 2D concept design of the project, including level design concept and object design. Before that, I didn’t have relevant experience and didn’t know where to start. Thanks to the relevant knowledge provided by team member Chris who is responsible for coding and game design, I have a more systematic understanding of the game production process.
Reference of level design
I can get some information from the reference. Including staring point, recover point, destination, position of boss, etc. Therefore, at least this information should be included in my level 2D concept.
In addition, level design also includes some level details, that is, how players overcome obstacles.
2D concept level
This level is designed with a game scene with the ocean as the background. The top view looks like a fish. Including staring point, recover point, destination, position of boss, position of resources, dark area, position of trigger and other information, and plan the player’s path forward.
The picture above is my description of some details in level designe. The pictures of 1-6 have been marked with corresponding positions in the top view.
In pictures 1 and 4, the main obstacle of the character is the underground heat wave, which will affect the player’s direction.
Figure 3 is a detailed introduction to the vertical direction of the level scene.
Figure 2, Figure 5 and Figure 6 mainly collect light sources through the character to trigger the mechanism.
The above picture is a sandbox version of the scene, which allows you to understand the map more intuitively and clearly. At the same time, this process is also conducive to unifying the team’s game screen production direction.
The main work of our team this week is to establish a clear game plan and plan the production time. Each member of the week is responsible for proposing a game plan. And after discussion, we finally decided to use my design plan.
The following is my game design. The production cycle of the game is expected to be 16 weeks. Therefore, in the deadline of Collaborative Unit, I may only show a production process without a finished work.
The following is my design this week. Using the knowledge of the narrative story frame in the Design for Animation, Narrative Structures & Film Language course.
GAME OVERVIEW
Design Goals
Overcome all obstacles and unlock the origin of the character.
COMMON QUESTION
1.What is the game?
Puzzle games
Narrative Games
2.Why create this game?
I wanted to make a game that was immersive. Let the player immerse in the fantasy fairy tale world, through simple decryption and map exploration, promote the development of the game story.
3.Where does the game take place?
The game takes place in Character’s dream, which is mainly divided into 5 scenes, which respectively represent different types of beautiful scenes in reality.They are respectively seabed – lake – forest – snomountain – cave.
4. What do I control?
Using mouse and keyboard to control the moving direction
Using keyboard to control the collection and placement of items
Using keyboard to release abilities of the character
5.What is the main focus?
It focuses on exploring the map and story, and immerses the player in the beautiful scenery.
The advantages of this strategy are:
1. The theme constitutes a natural attraction, and players who are interested in the theme are potential consumers;
2. This strategy helps the realization of high-quality storytelling. If the game world itself is credible, it will be relatively easy to build a set of credible characters and scenes for it, and these two elements are precisely the prerequisites for a good story. Stories can also become a player’s attraction, and it often brings real added value to the game. “The Last of Us” is a good player in this regard, it perfectly combines gameplay and narrative in everything.
As for the drawbacks, a lot of detailed control tends to make the development work more complicated, thereby increasing the development cost. In addition, the high requirements for environmental credibility will in turn affect the player’s action density, and the skills, attributes, and equipment of the characters that can be manipulated will be affected, which in turn poses a threat to the gameplay.
FEATURE SET
RPG
Through the obstacles of geographical location, reach the target destination
Third person perspective，Exploring and free lighting
The story takes place in an ordinary family. The father was a doctor who liked to work on his scientific gizmos and argued that technology could replace modern medicine. He had ambitions that never cured anyone. His strange thoughts and behaviors are often make him is regarded as dangerous people.
The daughter was born to see nothing. In such a family, the father did not make his daughter proud. On the contrary, he hated his father and hated himself for coming into the world.
However, on this day, the daughter saw the coveted color in her sleep and saw some strange objects. ——- Father’s invention succeeded!
2.Game storyline overview
Explore and discover: As an elf in her dream, the daughter saw the strange environment around her for the first time. Begin to embark on the road to find his own life experience. She can collect light near plants to light up the scene and light up the darkness. The story will be triggered after each journey. However, as the game progresses, the story gradually approaches reality.
Turning point: The daughter finally discovered her own misfortune. The previous experience was just a fairy tale world created by her father.
At the end of the game, blur the boundary between fairy tale and reality. The daughter thought she was back to reality, but she was still dreaming.
In short: the last player of the game will have a question: Is this a dream or reality?
So, Which fairy tale or reality do you choose to believe in? The answer is up to the player.
3. Game style
Stylized cartoon like ABZU
other reference
4. Game feature
It is an open world. You can collect light sources by passing through layers of obstacles. Lighting up your own world and feeling the beauty of nature.
5. Audiences
Teens and young adults ，Especially for players who like beautiful scenery.
6. Form of playing
Using a mouse and keyboard
7. In what kind of media
On computers or laptops
SPECIFICATION
1. Structure of the game
2. Main rules
1. Success conditions: collect natural elements, reach the destination and successfully light up the specified scene
2. Failure conditions: The character’s guts decrease when it is in the dark for a long time. Fail when the guts value is 0. Then back to the starting point
3.Suffering and challenge: through some force fields (vortex, swamp…), crossing cliffs, over obstacles, and exploring the darkness
3.Abilities/ Skills
The character emits light waves, temporarily illuminating the darkness
1. Economical system
Resource：light element
Produce；Plants can produce a certain amount of light elements in a period of time. Characters close to collect these elements.
Consume：
When a character places a light source, it needs to consume a certain number of elements
When a character releases a skill, it can consume a certain number of elements
Overall
This week I learned the corresponding knowledge of game planning in game production. At the same time, it also combines the narrative story framework learned in Term 1 and applies it to actual projects. Although the final result may only be a Level1 display.
In this week I mainly explained rendering in houdini, including mantra and arnold. Although I am familiar with Maya arnold, it took a long time to learn the course.
Compared with the previous three weeks, I encountered more problems in the Week4 course. The main problem is the installation and system matching in Arnold. Some versions will not display the Arnold plugin. Some versions of Arnold will be missing some nodes. In short, this process is very difficult. Below I will introduce some knowledge points I learned this week, from Mantra to Arnold.
render viewport, and render button
Mantra
Mantra is the renderer that comes with Houdini, but it has the problem of slow rendering speed. Therefore, it is usually rendered with the help of external renderer plug-ins.The following figure is the output node window.
The upper and lower screens allow us to adjust the parameters and observe the rendering results at the same time, which is very convenient.
Adjusting the internal parameters of mantra can speed up real-time rendering. Otherwise, we will often face software crashes.
For the environment light node, we can choose some built-in hdr maps at the red mark.
As shown in the figure above, the difference between different bits have different possible colors. Hdr can reach 16 or 32 bits. Before this, I just knew that we often use 8 bit images for Base color map, Roughness map, Metallic map, normal map and 16 or 32 bit for Displacement map.
Hlight node includes many different types of light sources. It is worth noting that the spot light switch is at the red mark in the first picture, which is different from the position selected for other types of light sources.
The above picture is a simple mantra rendering. Pay attention to the position and direction of the main light source in the hdr map. At the same time, we can also adjust the sharpness of the shadows.
Principledshader is a material node of mantra.
As shown in the figure above, there are two ways to assign materials. If the material is assigned at the same time, Houdini will give priority to the material in Figure 1. In other words, if there is no internal material, the overall external material will be displayed.
All in all, the ACES plugin will make the rendered image have more color information.
Arnold
When we directly use the Arnold renderer to render, we will get the picture shown above. Pink indicates missing material information.
First, delete the original material through the attribute delete node, and then add the Arnold material. After adding a point light source, the rendering result shown in Figure 2 is obtained.
The Angle parameter of Arnold light can control the quality of the shadow. The larger the parameter, the softer the shadow.
Also in the light menu, the camera parameter can control the rendering and display of the light. This operation is similar to Arnold in Maya.
We often encounter a problem: after assigning a basecolor map to the arnold material, rendering cannot be performed.
The reason is that the .tx format file cannot be generated and therefore cannot be rendered. So after canceling the automatic generation of tx files, Arnold renderer can run normally. But new problems have arisen. The color of The grid is not the information of the basecolor map.
Unlike MAYA, the plane created by Houdini has no UV information. So there will be a phenomenon that the texture display is wrong. Therefore, we need to add a UVproject node to give the grid a UV information.
As shown in the figure is the correct texture information. At the same time, we can also adjust the parameters of the Arnold material node and change the material of the model.
We need to manually add image formats such as exr, jpg or png in the rendering output settings.
In addition, we can also view the rendering list and check the rendering information.
In addition, the rendering of the particle part is a difficult point. As shown in the figure, the particles are not rendered.
Adding Arnold lights.
Don’t forget to delete the original material information.
Interesting shader-flat
curvature can automatically calculate the edge of the model
Curvature and ramp are used together to control the color information of the model
The final basecolor map
As for the material of the particles, there is no color information after linking the 30.user date node. Age and life information is also not reflected.
The cause of particle rendering errors is loss of information. Always refresh the information after importing files back and forth, otherwise there will be some errors.
Timeshift node will affect the calculation of motionblur.
In the exported settings, in addition to the rendering parameters, rendering position, format, we also need to adjust the camera parameters, including the screen size and focal length.
Through the interactive course of the second week and the after-school video of the third week, I mainly learned the special lighting, motion blur, and destruction.
Special lighting
This effect is mainly controlled through the normal channel. The main work is carried out inside the attribvop node. The add node is to add a point which can control the direction of the light source.
inside of attribvop
Motion blur
The production of motion blur is similar to lighting. The biggest difference between the two is that one outputs color and the other outputs position.
The main method for this effect is to delay the action by 1-2 frames through the timeshift node, and merge the two models. The main operation content is also in attribvop.
inside of attribvop
Destruction
Voronoi
When making the destruction effect in Houdini, we have to mention Voronoi. Voronoi is a subdivision of the spatial plane. Its characteristic is that any position in the polygon is closest to the sampling point of the polygon, far away from the sampling point of the adjacent polygon, and each polygon contains and only contains one sampling point. In mathematics, a Voronoi diagram is a partition of a plane into regions close to each of a given set of objects. In the simplest case, these objects are just finitely many points in the plane (called seeds, sites, or generators).
Practice
voronoi_spherevoronoi_box
First of all, for the Voronoifracture node, the most critical part is to import points. Therefore, scatter nodes are often used to obtain points on the surface of the model.
There are many ways to get points on the model. As shown in the figure above, this method is to obtain points information through the pointfromvolume node. Two effects are achieved by adjusting the internal parameters of the pointfromvolume node.
voronoi_sphere_pointfromvolume node2
If we want to increase or decrease the number of points, scatter node and pointfromvolume node are best used together.
voronoi_sphere_vdbfrompolygon node
The third way to calculate the position of a point on the model is to use vdbfrompolygon node. The function of the vdbfrompolygon node is to convert the solid polygon into a fog effect. By capturing the fog point through the scatter node, some good effects will be obtained. Of course, we can also merge some points on the surface of the model.
Noise
In the process of making the destruction, we must try to restore its details, such as the shape of the crack.
In the previous exercises, I focused on different methods of capturing points. Therefore, the cracks produced are all very straight lines. The solution to this phenomenon is to add a noise to the model.
However, new problems will also arise. After adding noise, we found that although the cracks of the model have reasonable bending. But the model itself has also been deformed, which is not in line with reality. For this, we need to add attribwrangle node to control, by writing code, to achieve the opposite effect of rest node. Furthermore, the details of the cracks are preserved, and the deformation of the model is also cancelled.
voronoi_box_copytopoints node
This desturction effect is mainly similar to the appearance of an object after being cut multiple times. Its main working principle is to make some planes and subtract objects with boolean nodes.
Among them, the attribrandomized node is mainly a random angle of the control plane. The function of the Copytopoint node is to transform the points into a model through the information of the import points and the information of the model.
wood
The production principle of the wood effect is mainly to stretch the previous average crushing. In this process, it is mainly controlled by controlling the transform node.
Compare the previous several different methods to make destruction. The rbdmaterialfracture node will be simpler and will have better results.
After testing the broken model, we have to conduct some physical tests. For example, falling objects.
As shown in the figure, the nodes in the video show that the process is mainly carried out in the dopnet node.
inside of dopnet
In this process, the point we have to consider is that the model should be packaged_create packed geometry.
glue
Under normal circumstances, in the process of making destruction, we also need to consider the role of glue. That is, there is attraction between groups and groups. This will make the effect more realistic.
This effect is mainly controlled by the second output node of rbdmarteialfracture node.
inside of dopnet
We then simulate the collision between objects. As shown in the figure above, a big problem is that the position of the cabin has moved.
To solve the above problems, the solution is to divide the cabin into two groups. One is movable and the other is immovable.
After dividing into groups, two attribcreate nodes are used to control whether the collision effects of the two groups are triggered. Mainly use float 0 and 1 to control.
The last effect is a combination of glass, concrete and wood destruction. For wood materials, the rbdmatreialfracture node can indeed achieve very good results, but it takes a lot of time to calculate. For this, the method shown in the figure is adopted. Obtain model points information through two nodes vdb and scatter. At the same time, the transform node is used to handle the effect of crack stretching.
After dividing into groups, two attribcreate nodes are used to control whether the collision effects of the two groups are triggered. Mainly use float 0 and 1 to control.
In short, in the process of making destruction, we have to consider the crack shapes of different materials, the interactive and non-interactive areas, and the glue between groups.
The lighting course is crucial to the quality improvement of art projects. Before that, I taught myself the Arnold renderer and Unreal’s real-time rendering system. And made some scenes related to lighting. But there is no systematic teaching.
The following is my combing of the knowledge points of the course and the lighting analysis in my three favorite films.
The role of lighting TD in VFX- Responsibilities:
Assemble all the CG Assets in the shot from the upstream departments
Design and implement lighting setup in shot to meet supervisor’s art direction
Create production quality CGI with optimal render settings in respect to resources available
Provide compositing team with the CG render elements required to deliver the shot
Skill requirements:
Understanding real-world/ studio lighting and photography
Help the artist to understand the motivation of the lighting design on-set and analyze the lighting methodically in order to replicate the look in CG.
Three-Point Lighting
Key light: The main source of light in the shot.
Fill light: The light fills into the key light’s shadow area
Rim light:For separating the subject from the background
Lighting Ratio
Stop value is measurement unit of the exposure.
+1 stop : Doubling the amount of light
-1 stop : Halving the amount of light
The ratios of the stop value of the subject’s Key side to Fill side.
For describing the lighting contrast.
Therefore, it can be divided into the following lighting methods according to the rate:
High-Key lighting:
The stop difference between the subject’s Key side and Fill side is subtle.
Low contrast ratio.
Low-Key lighting:
The stop difference between the subject’s Key side and Fill side is distinctive
High contrast ratio
Lighting Modifiers :
Reflector is used for bouncing light into the shadow side to lower the contrast.
Flag is used to block the unwanted light on the subject to increase the contrast.
Quality of Light Source
Hard light:
Sharp transition between the Light and Shadow on the subject.
Created by a single point of light which is focusing on the subject. For example: Spot light.
Soft light:
Smooth transition between the Light and Shadow on the subject.
Created by:
Large light source
Light Diffuser
Bounce light
Color Temperature
Color contrast between different light sources helps to shape the subject.
Interior vs Exterior
Time in the day
Artificial lights vs Natural lights: Indicate whether it is an interior light source or from outdoors.
Natural light variation throughout the day : To suggest the time of day
Creative Setup
Gobo lighting: Placing an object between the light source and subject in order to project it’s pattern / colour on the subject.
Catchlight: The bright reflection in the eyes might naturally occur when the corneas reflect the light source. In some cases It would also be added with extra light / reflector to meet the DOP’s art direction.
Identifying those techniques from the plate / reference and re-create the CG lighting:
Three-Point Lighting —————> Position and the direction of different light sources.
High-key and Low-key Lighting —> The contrast ratio of the Key and Fill on the subject.
Hard and Soft Lighting ————–> Transition from the Light area to the Shadow area.
Colour Temperature —————–> Define the time and space of shot is taking place in the story.
Creative Lighting ———————> Adding complexity to the lighting of the image
Knowledge in Physically-Based Rendering
Simulating light
Behaviors of light on different material
Method to Generate image
Path Tracing
Light Sources
CG lights:
Direct light- can be used as the main light source
point light- often used in rich scenes, high performance consumption
sopt light- analog spotlight
Quad light- fill light commonly used, the effect is the best, the performance consumption is the largest
Image-Based Lighting (IBL)
HDR map- often used as ambient light to supplement shadows
Problem-solving ( from the Pipeline point of view )
Environment
Crowd
FX
These three problems are the biggest problems encountered in rendering, and rendering takes a lot of time. Therefore, layered rendering and scene optimization are crucial.
Scripting ability ( what I need to learn)
Many VFX applications like Maya / Houdini support scripting language to provide artists powerful controls in asset creation / scene setup / pipeline etc.
As the VFX project is getting huge and complex nowadays, sometime it is the only practical way to perform the setup.
Lighting analysis
Lord of the Rings
This picture is a picture in Lord of the Rings. This screen uses the lighting method of 2 point light sources. The right side is the main light source. In addition, because it is a close-up shot of the character, an auxiliary light source is needed to target the eyeball before rendering. As for Color Temperature, natural light at night is used. The overall method is low key light.
The Avengers
This scene uses 3 point light sources. Among them, the main light source is in the upper right corner, and the fill light is in the lower left corner. The background of the war gave Iron Man a backlight. On the whole, Lighting Ratiois 1/5.
Due to the extensive use of special effects, including light effects and smoke, a layered rendering synthesis method may be used in the rendering.
Alita
This is a street view in Alita. In this picture, the main light source is on the back of the character. Lighting Ratio is 1/3. In addition, Color Temperature is to simulate the sunlight at noon.
This group cooperation project is a long-awaited course. The reason for saying this is that I have been thinking about what I truly like and what job position I will choose in the future.
In fact, I prefer to study some scene art, and I want to find a technical artist in the future. I talked to my mentor about work. However, I have not fully mastered the working skills of a technical artist. In this way, I hope to improve myself through a team project-game project. At the same time, I also want to have a game of my own.
Game Project
This game project has several goals:
It must have beautiful scenes.
A good story.
Apply the skills learned in term1
Achievable gameplay
Team
A good musician
A good programmer (UCL student)
A 2D and 3D visual artist (me)
Why are there only 3 people. This is a decision after team negotiation. This project may be published on steam. Operated by 3 people. But have to consider the time and workload. My idea is that I will do it as quickly as possible. If the production of all games is not completed within the deadline. I will provide some playable level or a video.
The Houdini exercise in the second week mainly includes some introduction to nodes and the use of particles.
Basic operation
1.ALT+left mouse button- control the arrangement direction of nodes2.L- sort all nodes
3.J+left mouse button can quickly link nodes
4. Y+left mouse button can quickly disconnect the node
Nodes introduction
The role of the mountain node is like noiseRandom colored nodesOther random color node link method- inside of attribvop nodeThe use of mulconst node- It is more like the use of multiplicationIntroduction to scripting language- test can be replacedaanoise- a kind of noiseturbnoise nodeaaflownoise nodecurlnoise node
ADD node
This operator outputs the sum of its inputs.
The first input can be an integer, float, vector, vector4, matrix3, or matrix. The allowed data types of subsequent inputs depend on the data type of the first input. For example, if the first input is a float, subsequent inputs can be either floats or integers. The output data type is always the same as the data type for the first input.
Reuse of add- Effect stackingReuse of add- another waybind node- import and outputbind node- output color
Particle practice
This particle practice course is mainly to make special effects for particles to follow the character, which is similar to the effect of fire. Since the character is moving, it is very difficult to watch the movement of the particles. Therefore, before testing the movement of particles, it is important to fix the character in a position and keep it still.
timeshift node- can pause animationunpack node- can split the normalized point, line and surfaceinside of popnet node_The figure is the effect of adding gravityinside of popnet node- popforce, popdrag and popwind can affect the movement of particlesmerge node- link characters and particlesproblem- bad effect due to character movement too fastSolve the problem- pointvelocity node- can increase trail for charactercopytopoint node- can transform particles into other objects, such as spheres attribcreate node- can change the size of the replacement objectattribvop node- better way to change the size of the replacement objectinside of attributevop fit node- adjust the size of the objectramp node- can generate gradient colorsadjust the color
In the Houdini course of the first week, I mainly learned about the UI of the software and how to use nodes.
UI
First of all, the UI of Houdini is easy to understand. At the beginning of learning this software, we should set up a UI layout of our own. As shown in the figure, this is the UI recommended by the teacher, which can greatly improve work efficiency.
The reason for choosing such a UI is that when we press the “P” key, there will be a menu bar as shown in the figure. This saves more space for Node.
Import
There are two ways to import files.
One is alembic node. The biggest feature of this node import is that it can only import files in abc format.
The other file node can import other formats, such as FBX, into Houdini.
Rock_ noise node
In the middle of the course, we also learned how to use noise node. One thing to note is that noise will affect the color of the object by default. Therefore, if we want to use noise to make a stone effect, then we need to replace “Cd” with “P”. In this way, the noise affects the bump information of the object.
In this session, I organized node to make it easier to observe. As shown in the figure, I divided the node into 3 parts. They are: import, setup and output.
Test_cabin modeling
It is important to determine the size of the model before making the cabin. In this cabin exercise, I learned nodes such as boolean, polyextrude, divide, subdivide, and reverse. The following figure shows the final effect and node display.
In the second week of class, the teacher mainly explained the modeling of the rest of the cabin. After class, I used my own method to model this cabin.
This tutorial mainly introduces the Unreal material and lighting system. I think what I learned most in this course is how to learn Unreal correctly. First, I will organize the content of the course. Then introduce the new learning method I got.
WHAT IS A MATERIAL?
It is essentially an asset applied to a mesh to control its visual look
In its simplest form, think of it as”Paint” with various properties such as Color and Finish
A Material defines how light interacts with the surface it is applied to.
WHAT IS PBR?
Unified lighting and shading system
Better approximation of light &materials physical interaction
Intuitive and consistent
Physically accurate
Uses real-world physical measurements
PBR is a combination of:
Materials
Lighting
Exposure
BASE COLOR (ALBEDO)
Flat color without specularity or shading
Linear RGB(Vector 3)values between 0~1
Avoid pure black(0) and pure white(1)as they don’t really exist in nature.
METALLIC
Grayscale value that ranges from 0~1
Most common usage is on or off(1 or 0)
When on(1),it yields a 100% specular reflection
ROUGHNESS
Grayscale value that ranges from 0~1
Ranges from smooth, mirror-like surface(0)to a rougher matte surface (1)
Unlike with Metallic,you are encouraged to fine-tune the Roughness value between 0 and 1 or use a bitmap to that effect.
SPECULAR
Grayscale value that ranges from 0~1
A good rule of thumb is to set the Specular value to 0.5 and fine-tune the Roughness value instead
In some cases,you may decide to edit the roughness value or use a bitmap to that effect.
SUPPORTED FORMATS
Uncompressed
BMP
TGA (Alpha)
PSD
Compressed
PNG (Simple Alpha)
JPG
DDS
HDR
GUIDELINES
Textures should always be a power of 2
16×16 all the way to 8192×8192 in size
Textures do not have to be square,as long as they are a power of 2
16×128 or 2048×1024 or 2×4096 are all acceptable examples
Textures can affect streaming and memory management
High-frequency textures can cause anti-aliasing artifacts
IMPORTING TEXTURES
Use the Import button or simply drag & drop from Windows Explorer
Textures are converted to .uassets
You can open a texture in the Texture Editor with a simple double-click
Here,you can change the Compression Settings if you need to
You can also enable or disable the linear color space (sRGB)
OVERVIEW
A Material is a combination of textures and mathematical calculations to define how light reacts to a surface
Materials define shading attributes such as color, roughness, metalness, etc..
You use textures to drive shading attributes(such as roughness for example)
Materials are built using the Material Editor
LIGHTING TERMINOLOGY
Direct Lighting is light that falls onto a surface without any interference. The light travels directly to the surface and that surface receives the full color spectrum of the light.
Indirect(or bounced)Lighting is lighting that has been reflected by other surfaces nearby.As light bounces off these surfaces,light waves are absorbed or reflected based on surfaces properties and passed on to the surface you are looking at. Thus,indirect lighting contributes to the mood and overal ight intensity.
Shadows happen when when Unreal Engine takes a snapshot of a mesh actor from a light’s POVand projects that information onto another mesh actor on the opposite side.
STATIC vs. DYNAMIC LIGHITNG
Baked (Static)Lighting is pre-computed/rendered lighting. Baked lighting is created using Unreal’s Ligthmass radiosity baker. Similar to rendering lighting with VRay, Corona etc. It is used to create high quality indirect lighting using light and shadow maps.Baked lighting cannot be altered at run-time, but has little impact on
Real-Time (Dynamic)Lighting is lighting that is updated each frame.It is fully dynamic and can be moved around and modified at run-time. It has no global illumination component (only direct light).It is also expensive to use (affects real- time performance).
Unreal can use both static and dynamic lighting.For Arch/Vis projects where assets are typically stationary, baked(static)lighting is mostly used.
LIGHT TYPES
Directional (Sun) Light
Point (Omni) Light
Spot Light
Rect Light
Sky Light
HDRI/lmage-Based Ambient Light
LIGHIT PROPERTIES
Intensity
Point & Spot Lights-unitless, candelas,lumens
100 watts = 1600 lumens
Directional (Sun) Lights-lux
Temperature
Indirect Lighting Intensity
Attenuation
Source Radius / Source Angle
Inverse Square Falloff
IES Profiles
LIGHT MOBILITY
Static
Baked indirect and direct lighting
Cheapest to use
Stationary
Baked indirect lighting
High-quality direct lighting &shadows
Limited use (max.4 overlapping lights)
Highest quality/Medium performance hit
Movable
Fully dynamic light & shadows
Highest performance cost
no indirect lighting
WHAT IS LIGHTMASS?
Offline Gl Renderer
Performance cost is virtually zero at run-time
The building process gets longer as your scene become more complex.
Lightmass is built using Unreal Swarm Agent
Adjust Lightmass Settings at the Actor level or more globally in the World Settings panel.
LEARNING METHOD
In this lesson, I learned a new learning method-learning through Unreal’s official resource package. In this official document, the performance and function of each node or material are explained in detail. Although after reading many explanations, some of the knowledge will be forgotten by me.
