Tutorials: Creating Scenes with Various Lighting Scenarios

1. Lighting In Unreal Engine | Maria Yue

The course is prepared by Vertex School in collaboration with Maria Yue, a Lighting Artist who specializes in video game development. Starting with Ubisoft Shanghai in 2012, she has 8 years of experience in lighting both in-game level and cinematics. Maria has worked for Ubisoft, Crytek, and Cloud Imperium Games. She is currently working as a Senior Lighting Artist at Splash Damage in the UK and her shipping titles include Far Cry 4, Far Cry Primal, Robinson The Journey, Climb, Star Citizen, and Gears5.

The course covers basic lighting theory, primary color theory of stage lighting, real lighting vs. CG lighting, and interior, exterior, and natural lighting. You will learn all the steps in the pipeline and understand how to make effective and efficient design decisions. This workshop consists of six modules of pre-recorded lessons and live Q&A sessions.

The core modules of the course: 

1. Best Practices. Different styles of lighting scenes: interior lighting, exterior lighting, natural lighting.
2. Interior. Lighting theory, Unreal Engine light types, Skybox, inverse squared, light ratio.
3. Exterior. Sunny 16 rule, skybox, exposure, DOF, camera settings, fog.
4. Character Lighting. Light setup, mood, shadows, skylights, volumetric fog.
5. Tailoring The Lighting Design. Theoretical and practical workflows, how to select references, and build moodboards.
6. Presentation. Posting, doing art tests, applying for the job, and interviews.

2. Unreal Engine 4 Lighting Fundamentals Part 1 | Florent Tunno

In this tutorial, Florent Tunno will provide you with the knowledge required to understand the tools and how to use them correctly. He will explain the 5 fundamental pillars of lighting inside Unreal Engine 4: directional light, skylight, post-process volume, volumetric fog, and light mass importance volume.

Florent Tunno is a Lighting Artist at DONTNOD currently working on Twin Mirror and a Lighting mentor at LISAA. His focus and attention to understanding how the lighting behaves and how it can drastically change the atmosphere of a scene make him an expert at crafting a compelling story using only lights.

3. Intro to Unreal Lighting

The instructor of this course is a Senior Lighting Artist, Amit Ginni Patpatia. In this course, you will have an access to the workflow and techniques of creating lights in Unreal Engine 4.2. 

In the first part, you will acquire some basic theories, such as the light source theory: Where do light sources come from? How lights are shown in different environments? And how lights are absorbed, reflected, and bounced based on different materials?

The second part covers the color theory, which will enable you to have a better understanding of colors. Also, you will get to know the color temperature, exposure, and color blending solutions.

The final part takes a deeper look into lights technology. Based on the case Sci-fi Fortress, the instructor will explain more complex concepts of lights, including point lights, dynamic light, static light, parallel light, and radial light.

You may find more courses and tutorials on our Workshops page. Also, don't forget to join our new Reddit page, our new Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.