Tech Art... Lighting Challenge!

 Hey, all! 

I'm sitting here waiting for 6,805 shaders to compile for my lighting homework... So what a perfect time for me to start chipping away at my blog post, huh? 

Have a song while you and I both sit here and wait. This soundtrack has been getting me through a lot of homework this weekend and I highly recommend it! When I'm not listening to new wave or 80s music, you'll usually find me listening to VGM of all sorts. 

Tangents aside, we're here to talk lighting! 

This assignment has been extremely fun, despite some setbacks. While I encountered a lot of errors and issues, I've had a lot of fun "building" this new world of lights! I've been trying hard not to overdo it with the lights, so let me know what you think of my built-out world.

Before I get started on my "dev log" for this post, I wanted to drop some of my light references below.

This was the mood I wanted to establish inside of the buildings in the world. I wanted it to feel warm and ambient, with not too much light, but not too little. I wanted fireplaces to emit an orange or amber glow, to give the room a slightly warm feeling. 

As for the outside, I wanted it to have a stormy, foggy appearance. Like a visual pea soup, you could say. I wanted the green water to be complemented by the fog, giving the sunlight a unique feel and providing me more opportunities to play with lights! Also, forgive the quality on this image. It was the closest thing I could get to what I wanted for the lighting. 

All that aside, let's delve into some of the "rules" of this challenge. 

This week's challenge involved learning about parent materials and instances, along with experimenting in different forms of light. I challenged myself to create a sky box and sky light for my Lego challenge, which actually helped me a great deal on this week's assignment! Hooray for Blueprints, the true hero in this whole operation. It's amazing what you can do with them! 

So, there were a lot of curveballs thrown my way for this assignment.

For starters, I went to class after working on my assignment all morning... Only to come back with no changes saved whatsoever. After some help from my teacher and peers, we figured out that I was going to have to rebuild from the ground up. And rebuild I did! 

It was a setback, but life is all about how you overcome those kinds of things. So I did what I do best, kept working at it. 

I actually ended up with better lighting in my second attempt, so I now understand the importance of iteration in all shapes and forms. Even on my second pass, I knew more about the process and was better able to optimize my time. Plus, I learned a great deal about Perforce due to the setbacks, and have now been making sure I update my depot with each save. 

Another setback happened later on, as I was working on my material instances. I saved an instance... and BOOM! All of the floors in my houses disappeared, which kind of destroyed all of the lighting I had worked for hours on. I had no way to undo, as I had just saved. 

Another setback, another solution... I simply replaced all of the planks using the meshes that came with the initial file. After that was done, I added my spherical reflection pieces to each room and finished adding the instances. Then, I was done...

...Or so I thought.

I had forgotten to update the Lumen and DirectX settings on this new version of the project. Since I had lost my initial save and had to restart on an entirely new one, I had totally blanked on redoing the shaders and lighting. So, after tweaking the settings, I realized that I needed to recompile everything and let Unreal restart.

So, that's where I am now. Letting all of my stuff recompile as I reflect on this project. I made a lot of mistakes this go-around, but I'm honestly really happy with this project. Life is all about making mistakes and learning from them. 

And learning I am! I never imagined that I would know about all of these things even just a month ago. 3D, lighting, game engines... All of it was beyond me, as I had no idea of where to start. So the fact that I'm even able to do this at all is incredible to me. 

To get back on the subject of lighting, perhaps my favorite part of the assignment was adding in the Skybox. I love the way that environment lighting can impact a scene. Even adding fog made everything feel mystical. It reminded me of Misty Bog from Spyro the Dragon and I loved being able to capture that feel in my own work! 

I love being able to add in my own HDRI skyboxes and give the worlds I create a unique feel. I am hoping that I can eventually do this with my own textures and materials. I would love to create a Spyro-esque skybox one day. It would be a dream come true! 

Well, I hope you enjoyed reading about my lighting process. Perhaps the hardest part of the assignment was not rebuilding all of the lights or even rebuilding the missing floors. 

The hardest part was actually submitting it to Perforce. Perforce is a little scary, but it has helped me a lot, especially after all my lights were poofed away. I definitely learned something about it today... Like, that you can be rest assured that Unreal will save your changes to Perforce, so long as you Mark them For Add and then Submit your change list to the server depot.

2,653 shaders to go and I can finish the rest of this project by submitting it to Perforce! I hope you enjoyed reading about my endeavors, and hopefully, this helped someone out if they've ever struggled with lighting or building out shaders. 

As a parting gift, have another wonderful song!

It's Showtime!