Lighting and Post Processing

We are going to be dialing in the lighting for our world.

Before that let’s cleanup our Outliner real quick, by creating folders for our Light Blocking Planes and our Static Meshes for the environment. Add each item to it’s respective folder.

Let’s first look at the Directional Light. In the details panel we can see a use temperature. If the lighting is colder it’ll be more of a yellow, but a hotter will give off more of a blue light. So if we want more of a dusk scene we will go with a colder temp.

But if we want a brighter scene we will go with a warmer temp.

If you were to uncheck affects world all of our light would disappear.

Unchecking Cast Shadows removes all shadows from the world. This might be useful if you want to add a secondary light that does not cast shadows.

Light Intensity controls how powerful our scene is. For our forest it brings our color into a darker scene with a lower intensity.

But if you go with a higher intensity it can be very bright.

Next let’s change the light color. This could be done for kind of an alternate environment. I could see this done either for an alien planet or maybe a dream scenario in the game. Where it is not quite how you would normally expect it to be. Most of the time you will want to leave the light color where it is at.

Now we are going to add a post-process volume. This can be done by adding under visual effects>postprocessvolume. It can go anywhere in the scene and then we will turn on infinite extend. Covering the whole level. If you wanted it to only effect a certain area you could keep it in the box. You can have multiple post-processes in a scene.

Bloom gives a glow effect. We used an intensity of 1.5

Exposure is like the gamma for our scene. Controlling how bright we want our level to be.

Lens Flares is like the glare from the sun.

Vignette is used mostly in horror games where we want the players focus to be placed in the middle of the screen blocking out the surroundings, but still allowing them to be seen.

Indirect Lighting Intensity which can be found under directional light allows for more lighting in areas we would not normally have them.

Exponential Height Fog has some fade out to things that are in the distance.

No Fog

With Fog

You could also change the fog color as well.

There are a lot of visual effects that can be added in post-processing it is best to go through your self and play with them and find out how each one effects your scene. Just make sure to reset it when you are done so you don’t get confused when they are stacking on top of each other.