Lighting Exercise in UE4: Night-Time Alleyway with Neon Signs

Introduction

Hi, my name is Ioana Tanasache and I’m a freelance CG Generalist specializing in Lighting and Rendering. Recently I’ve worked as head of department at Funko Animation Studios on a variety of fun projects that were created in collaboration with companies such as Disney, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and others.

Most of my work involves creating mood, depth, and atmosphere to support the narrative storytelling. As a lighting artist, I work closely with the modeling and compositing departments and the director in order to achieve cohesiveness and enhance the art direction, whether stylized or realistic. It’s also part of my job to take care of any technical challenges that come up, as in my experience when the delivery week is approaching, that’s when Maya likes to make things exciting! Problem-solving and thinking outside the box are key in this job and it’s just the most satisfying feeling when everything comes together at the end.

This past year I’ve been experimenting with Unreal Engine as I recognize it’s up-and-coming and its advancement in technology has definitely made a statement in the CG world. I thought it would be interesting to see how lighting works on the “other side” – when you’re not limited to a fixed camera and are free to explore your surroundings in real-time. While I was learning I did some lighting and concept art for a cool little indie game called “10 Miles To Safety” (it is out on Steam), and this proved to me how much the lighting and mood add to the user experience. Ever since, I have been taking ready-made scenes from the marketplace and re-lighting them in order to improve my lighting skills and speed up my workflow.

Education

I studied Computer Animation Arts at the NCCA at Bournemouth University. The course is great and well-structured, however, I didn’t know what I was going to do professionally at the time and felt a bit lost. I learnt everything from pre-production to compositing (as there were no Unreal Engine classes at the time) and along the way, I realized that I enjoy the look development side of things which encompasses modeling, texturing, lighting, and compositing. But having experienced the whole pipeline, I'd say knowing how things are done before and after your department is crucial to troubleshooting any issues from the early stages of any project.

About the Lighting Exercise

As part of my self-training, I set out to take ready-made assets from the Unreal Marketplace and re-light them according to various references I found online. The environment asset I’m using is called Downtown Alley from Emran Bayati.

Reference Is Crucial

As with anything creative, I start out looking for references as I believe they are the most critical part of the process. Looking at them for 50% of the time while working trains your eye to directly observe and understand what you are actually seeing, how light falls and bounces and creates local colours. Without references, you can easily and unknowingly veer away from the original concept/idea and end up confusing yourself. My intention was simple: I wanted a night-time scene with a Neo-Noir feel to it and came across these options:

I really like how the neon signs reflect in the water puddles and how the roughness of the ground catches the reflections. This amount of reference material is good enough to inspire me and get me started.

Colour Theory and Artistic License

Before we dive in, I wanted to touch a bit on colour theory and emphasize that the knowledge of it is essential to any lighting artist. However, colour is also subjective and personal. When you think about what sort of emotional response or message you want to send out, you want to do it in a way that is loyal to yourself and your style. Being confident with light and colour while still convincingly representing reality creates a successful base for your project. Therefore, although you are directly looking at the reference and trying to include that, it is not necessary to add every single detail and it’s okay to choose to leave some areas up to your own artistic license. Sometimes the best lighting isn’t the one that is technically correct and accurate but what “feels right” – so I wouldn’t worry about trying to be perfect or you’ll end up over-working it.

Lighting Process

When beginning a new project there are a few things I like to do in preparation:

• disable the auto-exposure settings in Project Settings
• set up the SkyLight and the SkyBox Mesh with an HDRI
• create a CineCamera with a 16:9 DSLR Filmback and a 30mm Lens and create a nice frame
• lay down a Post Process volume with custom manual camera settings
• lay down an Exponential Height Fog with volumetrics turned on, we will adjust this later
• lay down a Lightmass Importance Volume
• create and place around Reflection Spheres

Key Lights and Fill Lights

The first thing I see when looking at the reference are the neon signs glowing in the foggy atmosphere. These are the key lights and they will be addressed first. They are created using an emissive material with a colour plugged into the emissive slot inside the material.

Next, I used Rectangle lights to create a volumetric glow around the neon signs and help them stand out. This is where I play with the Exponential Height Fog settings to achieve some depth and atmosphere and obtain the result I want to see.

Once I’m happy with these, I then think about how the neon sign lights are spilling into the environment and what is being affected. For this, I use multiple Point Lights with various intensities to bounce colours and fill darker areas around the environment such as the side of the buildings, the car, etc.

At this point, Unreal Engine becomes very exciting and makes experimenting with light a lot of fun. To quickly change colour and intensity in real-time without waiting for a render is so fast and gratifying that all your artistic senses are being tickled.

I also added a couple of spotlights in the background to separate the car from the main street and give the far back building a bit of dimension. The car also received some spotlights at the front in order to bring attention back to the centre of the image.

Final Touches and Subtleties

Lighting Adjustment

When I was mostly happy with how it looked, I decided to step away from the project and come back to it later with fresh eyes. This made me realize that my render was not as vibrant as I wanted and it felt like it fell a bit flat. So, I added another couple of point lights with a very low intensity that carried a bit of green and purple. This may not make a huge difference, but for me, it’s adding an extra layer of colour that complements and supports the overall scheme.

Before/after:

Post Processing Volume

I decided to add some steam FX and do some grading and colour correction. I increased the global contrast and gain to bring a bit more punch into the picture and created my own LUT in Photoshop (following this tutorial), aimed at getting a blue overall tone with some warmer and neutral colours running throughout.

Before/after:

Rendering Features

Diving into the rendering features I enabled the usual Ambient Occlusion, Screen Space Reflections, and Screen Percentage to 400. These small changes wrap up the project nicely and give you a nice high-quality shot.

Optimizations

For this project, I chose to make all lights dynamic because I wanted to focus on the look and not be hindered by baking time. I normally would start off with dynamic lights and gradually bake them once I’m happy with the setup. At the end of the day, it really depends on the needs and requirements, there are games with either dynamic or fully baked lighting.

Feedback

Coming from a CG Animation background I can only praise Unreal Engine due to its efficiency and real-time performance. The workflow is great because the feedback is instant, allowing for many more iterations than if you had to wait for long renders. Its PBR-based lighting and materials, extensive customisation, and real-time capabilities are leading the way and I expect many more animation and film companies to be using this technology in the near future.

Completing this project confirmed for me that general lighting principles and techniques do stay the same when transferring from one software to another, and I’m excited to learn more about this software and delve into topics such as level design and more in-depth programming using Blueprints.

Tips and Educational Resources

My tips for anyone trying to improve is to keep practising, studying, and experimenting with different lighting scenarios. I also recommend playing with the manual camera settings by adjusting the lenses and the f-stop and seeing how it can fundamentally affect the mood of a scene.

In terms of other resources, I personally found this book to be exceptionally helpful – Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter (Volume 2) (James Gurney Art) – and I also frequent this website for inspiration and simply gazing at movie frames – https://film-grab.com/.

Ioana Tanasache, CG Generalist

Interview conducted by Ellie Harisova