top of page

THE LOFT

Development Info

Engine: Unreal Engine 4

Dev Time: 6 weeks

Design Goals

  • To reach a greater understanding of both realistic day and night lighting.

  • To become more familiar with Unreal Engine 4's lighting capabilites.

Pre-Visualization

As this was my first in depth project dedicated to lighting in Unreal Engine 4, I needed to plan out exactly what types of light I would need create and observe how those types of light interact in the real world. ​

​

The other aspect that required some planning was the layout of the room as I was trying to show two separate lighting scenarios in the same space, while still keeping the rooms believable as living spaces. 

​

As I was going for a more realistic lighting setup, I drew a diagram showing my initial placement and thoughts on where I would need to place lights in the scene to achieve the look I wanted. 

Apartment.jpg

Above Image: Top Down Apartment Floorplan. ​

Production

Since I took the time to plan the space and what type of light I want to focus on in pre-visualization, I was able to jump right in to the Engine at this point and start placing assets in the rooms. After the space was populated, I started on adding the lights.

​

DAYLIGHT

The room the player starts in is dedicated to showcasing the space in daylight. The focus of this room is the window looking out into the city. As the sun is the main light source of the daylight setup I really wanted to add some sunbeams that would pierce through the curtains into the room and have an effect on the depth of field where the objects behind it are a bit out of focus.

NIGHTTIME

The second room the player enters showcases a night time lighting set up with the fireplace as the main source of light in the room. The challenge with this room was to create a specific cozy mood yet still make the space easy to see. 

​

​

One of the challenges I faced when creating this setup was light bleeding through some of the meshes. I solved this on two fronts.

First, I built the apartment using BSP but light was creating artifacts where pieces were connected. I converted the walls, floors, and ceiling to Static Meshes in order to mitigate these artifacts. Second I used two separate Post-Process Volumes in the two different rooms. Using the two volumes to blend the lighting setups allowed for a smooth transition between the night time room and the daylight room as the player is moving throughout the space.

1.jpg

Above Image: Daylight Lighting setup

Gallery
Day 1
Day 2
Night 3
Night 4

Post-Mortem

Challenges

  1. Composing a scene that is good for gameplay as well as visually tells a story.

  2. Creating two separate moods within the same space.

Solutions

  1. Pushing the night scene to be darker in some areas and feel mysterious allowed the two different scenes to pop more. 

  2. To support possible types of gameplay the layout of the apartment creates a looping flow between the two rooms.

bottom of page