a lighting/env work in progress

30 Sep 2022

I had this vision for a really long time and had collected all sorts of references over the course of several months. Coming from Singapore, I wanted to do something that was like a greenhouse, but in a solarpunk world. Obviously since I am focusing on lighting here, I decided to rework an existing UE5 map to the best of my abilities rather than overscope and start modeling, texturing and everything.

I also did another version which was a moody, humid abandoned greenhouse vibe.

I tried to do this one with a different, colder fog color, but I actually prefer the first direction I had with this, even if the composition is kind of “neater” or clearer here, with the darkened foreground.

These were some of my notes from the first pass at this version.

I did a first pass of a third version of this scene, which was a kind of high-class, indoor, night-time building. My first pass was very weird, there was some strange oversaturation in my moonlight and the moonlight was fighting with the warm local lights.

I made some progress on it since and now it looks like this with the preview lighting. Maybe one day I will be able to make a process video like I did for the first version of this scene.

I spent a super long time on this and it still isn’t done - I want to try the new lighting on foliage that was released. Lumen Backside Illumination for Two-Sided Foliage was released in the UE5-Main branch, which means that Lumen now scatters indirect light through foliage. Plus, I have a few more ideas for this environment, like a moody, abandoned vibe, or underwater, a night time, etc. So I will take my time with this one and kind of make a little progress on it every now and then.