This week I will foucus on the lighting, and add more details on the scene.
Unreal Engine is different from Maya in that it has a pre-defined physical sky sphere that completely simulates reality and can change day and night by adjusting the sun’s height, etc. So I drag a BP_Sky_Sphere into the scene, and turn down the sun height into -5, that’s a pretty nice deep night sky for my work. Further more I can also adjust the stars brightness, and I wanna keep them a little in the sky cause the mist I mentioned before could cover most of them. And I also add a little horizon falloff cause the skyball has some bright color in the border.
The next step is to add a directional light as the moon light, I also keep the low key of intensity about 0.05 lux. And choose a gray-toned blue-violet for the light color. And drap exponential height fog into the scene. The fog system is also great, but this time I just want to have some volume fog. So I turn off other option just keep the volume fog on. Until then I alreay done 70% light effect.
So I started creating artificial light sources. I first chose to put a point light source on all the lanters, and then adjusted the light color and scattering range, which was great. One of the most exciting things about working in Unreal Engine is being able to see the results in real time, and I must admit that at some point it motivated me to keep working on it. Then I went on to create some spotlights, some in front of stores some at the front of trains, and increased their volume fog impact values, and I enjoyed seeing this Tyndall effect lighting.
The lighting effect is basically complete, in order to enrich the whole scene I also did some decal materials, these materials are like Maya’s transparent mapping, I used this material to do some wall graffiti and warning lines on the ground.