UE4 Lighting & look development (2019)

These shots were taken during various points of look development for a project that was cancelled.

The goal of this ~6-month exploration was to see how much bang-for-buck we could achieve with the simplest possible lighting setup. The setup was a stationary directional light with a static skylight (wired with a real-world HDR cube map to inject real light color instead of sampling the monochromatic game environment).

The bulk of the environment lighting was handled with reflection probes to increase the sampling of spatially varying reflections and lighting, and where needed large area lights were added to boost readability.

Cave interiors were lit more traditionally (or like an interior set) using hand-placed spot lights and area lights to help bring the exterior lighting inside in a naturalistic way in addition to leveraging realistic exposure behavior.

Aesthetically, my goal was to make the world look as "un-lit" as possible. This was to emphasize the period and setting of the project where I felt a more naturalistic approach would help the world recede a bit so that gameplay could pop off the screen when FX came in.

The shots are a mixture of totally baked lighting and fully dynamic (both were explored to see what might work best for the project.)