Download Subtitles for Lighting Interiors in Unreal Engine 5

in today's video we'll be taking a look at interior lighting combining the uses of lumen Hardware R tracing and Patch racing I'm going to show you how you can think of lighting in a way that will help you pick and choose the mood you're going for by simply lighting a couple of different lighting scenarios it will really help you break down how to light any given interior now full disclosure this video is sponsored by Nvidia studio and scan computers everything from the modeling layout lighting rendering and editing of this video had been done with the Asus zbook Pro 16 OLED laptop I don't get to keep the laptop it's being sent back and only being used for reviewing purposes just before we jump into today's tutorial I'm going to take a brief moment to talk about the hardware we're using today the Asus Zenbook Pro 16 ODed laptop runs on a beefy RTX 4070 that allows you to fully utilize Hardware rate tracing and path tracing and tensor AI cords which is going to help massively when you're rendering your shots it's got the Cuda cords you need which are needed if you plan on 3D scanning things with an app like reality capture and since it's the 40 series GPU you can benefit from dss3 which I've talked about in an earlier video right here it's got 32 gigs of RAM a core I9 processor which handles unrealed Shader compilations like an absolute champ the display on this laptop is absolutely top-notch 120 HZ with 100% DCI P3 and 100% srgb color coverage and it's OLED meaning your black that can be nice and Inky some notable quality of life features include this Nifty hinged keyboard which not only feels a lot more natural to me when I'm typing but also seem to help with the cooling and the trackpad has haptic feedback which was a nice surprise Nvidia studio is for creators but Nvidia GeForce is for gamers right down to the drivers even on my personal desktop workstations I'm always using Studio drivers just because I find them a lot more reliable than the game drivers for Creative work specifically if a laptop or desktop is NVIDIA Studio validated it means it spec and design meet the needs of a Creator you can get Nvidia Studio laptops at scan computers you can check out the link down below I thought it would would be fun to make a tutorial using a laptop for a change because a lot of people assume that the work I do in unreal can only be done on a crazy expensive workstation desktop and that's just not the case so let's get started with what you came here for lighting Interiors in Unreal Engine 5 okay so since we're getting started I just want to make sure that you all have the same project settings that I'm using I am currently using Unreal Engine 5.3 so by going to the settings up here we're going to go to Project settings we're going to scroll down to the rendering tab down here and you're going to want to make sure that support Hardware R tracing and turned on and pth tracing and turned on here as well I'm using virtual Shadow maps and make sure that used Hardware R tracing when available is turned on and it should go without saying but if you want this to work you need a GPU that is capable of rate tracing the GPU in this laptop is an RTX 470 so you're not going to have any issues with it and one last thing we're in the search panel up top we're going to search for Direct X and I believe you need to have direct de 12 enabled at least that's what I'm using and it works like a charm so here we have a scene that I made an unreal that is Loosely inspired by a scene in Game of Thrones and before we get started with the lighting let's look at the reference and try to break down where the light is coming from notice how there is no artificial lighting the only thing we're seeing is light pouring in through that doorway at the top of the stairs that is the only light source and the camera is exposing for the interior making the exterior completely Overexposed and and blown out and that is what we're going to try to mimic here now this laptop handles this scene like an absolute champ I'm blazing past 60fps without any issues and if you want to follow along with the environment in this tutorial and reverse engineer how to scene was lit you can download this project for free here on gumroad link down below just to be clear though it's not going to look exactly the same because I'm using a lot of Mega scans textures and models in this level and I'm not legally allowed to redistribute those assets but you will have something to work with and the lighting will look the same so what we're going to do now is we're going to completely kill all of our lighting and we have to create a daylight system using the environment light mixer as always so by going to the window tab up here we're going to go to the environment light mixer create Skylight atmospheric light sky atmosphere and height fog and next we're going to create a postprocess volum drag it into our scene here and make sure we set it to Unbound make sure this is checked right here you'll see this is really important for pretty much everything moving forward in this video so you'll see obviously this is very underwhelming when it comes to interior lighting indirect lighting is everything and that's the main takeaway here the easiest way is to increase the brightness of your Skylight because this is our main source of light notice in our reference we don't have any sunlight coming in there the sun is probably pointing in a totally different direction we only want Skylight coming in so we can select our Skylight and we can increase intensity scale to something ridiculous like 20 or 100 1,000 you'll see we're starting to get a little bit more lighting coming into our scene but you'll see uh you know it's not really great it's very splotchy and I think that's really just because it's a limitation of lumen right now with the Skylight it just doesn't have enough sample to work with and so when that doesn't work what's next we can increase the exposure of the scene so we're going to go to the postprocess volume and we're going to search for e and I'm going to check these three boxes here and uncheck apply physical camera exposure and we can adjust the exposure this way now again this brightens everything up but it's still pretty splotchy not really what we're going for it's not really what we want and we get this really not so great looking Blue Fog and that's because we want to make sure that we select our exponential height fog and turn on volumetric fog you'll see why does it important later now in order to give your Skylight a bit of a boost you can also increase the brightness of your directional light to something like I don't know like 800 or something and that will also help inject a lot more light because as you increase your directional light it increases the brightness of your sky as well so it kind of goes both ways honestly I think a th here is probably a bit too strong I would rather play around with the exposure later so now we are getting a bit of a better result over here but still this is not what we're going for and the reason why because the indirect lighting quality of lummen is great but Lumen just does not have enough samples to really get a high quality render from such a tiny light source coming in through that window so we need to fake it and in order to fake it we're going to go ahead and create a wrecked light over here and drag that over here and Loosely shape it to the well shape and size of our doorway here so by increasing the sord width and the sord height like that Loosely matching the size of it the Skylight does inject a little bit of indirect lighting but it's just not enough you're not getting enough consecutive bounces here so we need to inject some some direct lighting with the help of the rec light here to really get some better results okay so with our rec light we're also going to increase the attenuation radius and maybe set the value to something like 800 and now notice how we are getting a much more interesting look all because we've introduced a bit of direct lighting it's okay to fake things now I'm going to incre I can change the color a little bit make it a little bit cooler and there you have it we're already having a much Bluer look to our scene and already we are about 60% of the way there but you'll notice that the these areas here are still very black not very good looking what more can we do we don't want to increase the exposure we want to increase the indirect lighting values sometimes looming can be a little bit tricky so this is why I like using the path Tracer sometimes in order to help me figure out like hey am I actually doing things right here so by going to the lit tab here we're going to go turn on path tracing and what the path Tracer is going to do is it's going to give you a more ground shrew physically accurate lighting result based on your current lighting settings this is what your scene should look like if everything is set up correctly there should be no tremendous difference between the two they should both be pretty similar and if they're not then there's other issues we need to fix so you'll see we're missing out on a ton of indirect lighting over here it's you'll notice it's not perfectly black it's not there not black at all there so we need to go fix that somehow right we need to try and rectify this issue and how do we inject a little bit more indirect lighting into our scene we don't want to go ahead and increase the exposure again that will work but it also brightens up everything else and we don't want that all we want is to lift up those Shadows a little bit more so we're going to go ahead and click on our wck light here and we're going to scroll down to indirect lighting intensity so I'm going to bump this up to something like five to exaggerate it a little bit and you'll see hey we're starting to get a lot more indirect lighting into our scene it's all already looking a whole lot better now keep in mind this is not a physically accurate setting your changes here will not be mirrored in the path Tracer because What's Happening Here is a surface is reflecting five times more light than it is receiving which is physically impossible so use this with caution use it only more of a subtle art Direction kind of feature okay now another issue that I'm noticing is our shadows here are very harsh right again if I turn on the path Tracer um you'll notice that Shadows are very very soft here right they look really really good and I don't I'm not seeing that we're getting these really hard Shadows here something feels off and the reason for that is because of virtual Shadow Maps when it comes to very very soft Shadows you're just kind of hitting that limitation there so in order to fix that we're going to select our rec light again and we're going to search for R trace and we want to make sure we cast R Trace Shadows on and pay attention to the shear difference here no especially notice on the wall here this is before and this is after before and after the Shadows are so much softer so we're getting much much better softer Shadows here now when you need those really really soft Shadows there's no way around using Hardware Ray tracing and that is where RTX gpus come in really really handy another reason it's incredibly important to add direct lighting even your if your scene is mostly indirectly lit it's because of specular height light now pay attention right here on the pillar on the left hand side here I wanted to give it like a you know a running water kind of look like it was very damp if I hide my recck light right now and I only rely on the indirect lighting from Lumen and I'm going to go ahead and increase the exposure here just for clarity sake notice how it doesn't look wet and the reason for that at least this is my understanding Lumen indirect lighting is not going to contribute to specular highlights at least not very much you can clearly tell right here that there is just no real specular highlights we completely lost the that wetness that it had right and so that is why it's really important to inject that direct lighting to make that surface look wet now bonus tips number one if ever you notice this kind of like light bleeding in your Interiors this is actually something that's pretty common you'll notice like along the edges you just got this weird light that seem to be the Skylight that's coming through the walls you need to go ahead and add some light blockers to the exterior of your level and what I mean by this is these large white cubes right it's literally just a big white Cube that I place underneath my level to make sure that light is being blocked correctly because as we saw earlier the Skylight has some very low resolution sampling which makes it very splotchy and sometimes at least my understanding is that you just need more geometry to block that light coming in so again if I were to just lower this cube right here notice how we're getting a whole bunch of light that bleeding into our scene here just lifting this big Cube up here whoa that light's gone that is how you can fix light that's leaking into the corners of your wall it's very frustrating but fortunately with light blockers it's a very easy fix now let's say you wanted to have some light Shaft or some God Rays coming through the window you can absolutely do that too so all we need to do is grab our directional light here and rotate it so that the sun shines through the the doorway and we can angle it the way that we want to something like this and you'll see it injects quite a bit of indirect lighting into our level as well and we got these light shafts here thanks to the volumetric fog that we turned on in our exponential height fog earlier see if I turn off volumetric fog here it's going to be a totally different look and we don't get those light shafts coming through if I want to make that light shaft even stronger we can simply just increase the volumetric scattering intensity even higher so I I have already set it to 10 here by default it'll be one you might not even see it but if it increase it to like 50 100 you'll see it's a very very strong God Ray shining in our scene now and already we're getting quite a bit of indirect lighting bouncing up and lighting the rest of our scene this doesn't match the reference we were going for but I still just wanted to show you that it is something that you can do but for now I'm just going to go back bring it back up here because that's not the look I wanted every single light can had its own volumetric scattering intensity you'll see in my re light I already had it cranked up to six if you want more fog like that coming coming in which we do have in our reference here that is how you can control that bonus tip number two there's one more trick we have up Our Sleeve in order to inject a little bit more indirect lighting into our scene again this break physicality but it's a really cool tip to know about in our postprocess volume we're going to search for Lumen and here we've got a neat little tip called diffuse color boost I already set it to two but if I set it to one you'll see our shadows are very dark right it it's very pitch black we could always just increase the indirect lighting of our wck light but by increasing the color boost here it's going to increase the Boost of not our light but of the albo values of our materials so if I set it to two you'll see we've already injected quite a bit more indirect lighting into 2 our level here again purely n Direction thinging there's no right or wrong way to do it it's just important to know which tools are available to you so I hope that helps so now that we covered this scene here how do you light an interior that doesn't have any natural light and that my friend is artificial lighting so I'm going to hide this here and turn this on here you'll see here we've got a completely differently lit scene I'm not going to go ahead and show you how to place each individual light but really it's about breaking down what our light lighting is this is a really quick reference I found from some old Museum somewhere and notice how there is no natural light here it's all artificial you as a lighting artist need to break down and ask yourself where is my lighting coming from if I turn on my light in my bedroom at night the light source is your light bulb or your lamp or whatever and that's how we need to break it down here so I went ahead and added some light fixtures here we need a physical prop that is there to suggest that hey there's lighting here this is this is actually what is contributing to the illumination of the scene because if I were to hide these light fixtures here and you just Place light something would feel a little bit odd something feel like something is missing right so that's why we need not only add some practical light props but really think about where the lights are coming from and then I just added some point lights here and adjusted them to the rough shape of my light source by increasing the uh Source length here you can kind of increase The Source length of any point light and I've just went ahead and placed them there and again using the exact same trick that we learned earlier either the exposure of your post-process volume the global exposure of your scene or the indirect lighting intensity of your light or the diffused color boost of your postprocess volume right if I want to set the two or five you'll see we've made this scene much much brighter not really the look and going for but you get the idea the actual lighting part here is not very complicated again just to give you one more example I've used these torch props that are on the wall to suggest torch light and also each point light that I placed again it's really just a simple Point light right here that I placed over the torch each light that I placed also has a volumetric scattering intensity that I cranked way up to suggest that maybe there's a little bit moisture in the scene or a little bit of haze or smoke or whatever that's really it the key to interior lighting is just to break down where my lighting is coming from and understanding exposure indirect lighting and direct lighting all right thanks so much to Nvidia studio and scan computers for sponsoring this video scan computers are one of the leading resellers on Nvidia Studio laptop and desktops in Europe if you're looking for an Nvidia Studio laptop then check out their range at the link down below so thanks so much for watching everyone I hope you found this video helpful and as always folks happy rendering