Slay Workflow 5: Lighting | Unreal Engine

Hi, my name is Travis Borbo and I'm the head of visual development at Mold3D.

Today we're going to be taking a look at cinematic lighting inside of the Slay project.

If you have not already, you can download the project from the Epic Marketplace and follow along.

We'll be covering the basics of environment lighting, starting

from scratch with the lights turned off and rebuilding

the lighting along the way so that you're able to either follow along with the project to make tweaks to the lighting or possibly even have the confidence to build a lighting scenario of your own.

With that said, I hope you enjoy the process and let's get started.

To get started, we're going to take a look at the environment level. When you open it up, you'll have several sub-levels loaded.

So you can go ahead and click and remove any of the extra sub-levels that you don't see here.

What we're concerned with is Temple Lighting, Temple Geo, and Temple Characters. For Temple Characters, you can go ahead and turn that eye off.

And if you'd like, you can remove it because we're going to be dealing mostly with the architecture.

Once you remove temple characters, we're left with temple geo and temple lighting.

If I go into temple geo, you'll see that all the architecture disappears.

By toggling the visibility back on, we can bring it back.

When we look at the temple lighting, the temple lighting is known as a lighting sub-level.

Typically, we'd have an LSL underscore and whatever that scene name might be.

For this project, since we only have the temple, we'll just be calling it Temple Lighting.

If we toggle our visibility off, all the lighting disappears. However, if you click around, you can notice that the geo is still there.

If we go up here to our View Modes in our main menu, you can go down to different view modes like Lit, Unlit, Lighting Only, and Detailed Lighting.

We'll be going over all of these as we go through the project today, and a lot of our lighting will be done in Lighting Only.

For right now, we want to go to Unlit. Once you click on Unlit, you can see all of your Geo's revealed.

And now that it's revealed, let's go over making a new lighting sub-level so we can recreate the lighting from the environment from Slay.

If you haven't created a level before, you simply right-click, go to Level, and give it a name.

I'm simply going to put Light Setup for now, and I'm going to drag this over to my Levels panel.

Once it's in the Levels panel, we'll want to double click on it and select it. That way, when we go to our Place Actors and start adding our base lights, we're adding them into the correct level.

Essentially, your lighting sub-level, if it's for the environment, should only have environment lights in it.

That way, if someone else is to pick up your scene or jump in to start working on it, and they notice that it's packed with Geo or there's other items like effects, they'll have a question of whether or not it should be there.

After dragging your lighting level into your levels panel, double-click it to make sure it's selected.

We're going to go down to a place actors panel, select a lighting submenu inside, grab a few directional lights, and drop them in.

We're going to also grab a skylight, and then we'll select the visual effects menu.

Once we get the visual effects menu, you'll want an exponential height fog, a volumetric cloud, and a sky atmosphere.

Once we have our lights in the scene, We'll want to zero them out in your Details panel and go to our World Outliner and start to rename and keep them organized.

So once you've dragged all your lights and everything is renamed and organized, we're ready for the next step.

So on the next step, you'll want to add a post process. You'll go to that same place Actors, type in Posts in your search, and just drop the post process volume into your scene.

It doesn't really matter where you put it. Then select Post Process and go over to your Details.

Once we're in the details, you're going to want to go to the top search panel and type in post or rather unbound.

And once you have unbound, you can make sure that your box here that says infinite extent unbound is selected.

The only thing this is going to do is make sure that that effect happens throughout your entire level.

So we'll X out of that search details to get our menu back. Then we're going to go down into exposure.

So we won't get too deep into color grading on this project, and we might touch on a few items on the post-process, but for now, all you need to be concerned with is the exposure compensation.

We're going to set that at 1.8. We're also going to go down to the min and the max and set those both to zero because we don't want our scene exposing up and down.