Grads in Games Search for a star. Page 7: Lighting and Post-processing in Unreal Engine.

Material Set ups

Glass Wall Material Set Up:

Opacity setting is alpha sample type.

Wood Material Set Up:

Figure 2. Broken landing material set up.

Wood Material Set Up:

The rest of the material sets look like figure 3. With a mixed map, I simply wanted to connect opacity in separately just to be safe. That is for any assets that directly have important influence from an opacity or alpha map.

Composition Changes

As you can see from the different in the blocking and final asset stage, the proportions are much better and realistic to the human figure.

Metal Roof

I realised that having a metal roof on wooden beams is completely unrealistic. I went back and changed the base and roof structures into wood with SP.

Imperfections

I noticed that all of the wooden assets do not match very well. Perhaps I should have textured them together after all. Or ensured I used the exact same settings for the dust, dirt and colour tints. Also, see figure 6, the panels did not bake very well. The panels in the middle are fine, though the ones on the sides are hardly seen. Also, I did not properly UV the wood grain directions, so there looks like there is one direction to all of the wood parts. On second thought, the areas that should have different wood direction are the baked details, so I am not sure how that would work. Perhaps I should have added more detail in low poly, then UVed them correctly.

This asset acted weirdly, in Unreal it looked transparent for an unknown reason..

To fix the issue in figure 8, I separated the rope models from this asset. That way I was able to add specific texture maps to each asset. Ones that I already made, yes. However, I left out the opacity map for the wood and added it only to the rope asset. This seemed to fix the issue.

Mesh Lights

To make the mesh lights I created Unreal materials with emissive qualities to make designated models glow.

Stair light colour changed to yellow:

Sky Colouring

I played around with the settings for the sky and atmosphere quite a lot.

2D scene capture – Infinate effect

I used the 2D scene capture camera technique to produce the infinite effect. I decided this upon doing more research and practice, as well as some advice from others.

I used this forum for the method: Infinity Mirror Room – Development / Rendering – Epic Developer Community Forums (unrealengine.com)

However, I had some trouble making the infinite mirror work. Here is the first try, where the image on the target plane was extremely dark:

Figure 17. Testing if D scene capture cam works.

I tried lighting the scene and the plane more.

Figure 21. With two planes and two cameras.

I tried adding a light directly onto the plane, though I am doubtful that this is the proper method to do this. I also created the second plane to test the infinite effect, to no avail. There is no infinity yet. I tried making the surfaces mirrored, but no fix to the issue there either. I found the correct setting for the planes is the unlit setting. However, with this applied I cannot add surface imperfections to the planes, unfortunately.

Now that I am up to this stage, I just need the infinite effect to work and to apply the effect to the place the actual mirrors are in scene. Like this:

Figure 22. Adding 2D scene captures to the infinite mirror planes in scene.

I found the correct settings to make the infinity mirror to work see figure 23 and 24.

Figure 23. Settings that make the infinite mirror to work.

Every time I checked and unchecked the second setting, it seemed to add bounce reflections, which was very strange but nonetheless it worked. I increased the resolution to no more than 2000×2000, any higher and there would be issues.