Lighting Issues

One of the first things I bumped into was that the scene was, by default, quite dark. I knew this was something I could tackle with post processing, but I wanted a little more control. So, to solve the issue, I used Rectangle Lights in key areas to brighten up the kitchen. I tried to use desaturated colors pulled form the surrounding to mimic the look of bounced light reflecting around the room.

A spotlight placed outside the room got me the “light streaming through a window” called out in the brief. With some post process settings, I added some bloom, light chromatic abberation, and lens flare to the scene as well. I felt these helped to highlight the window light and soften the lighting in areas, while still allowing for areas of brighter contrast with hard edges.

Upon Refelction

The rectangle lights did start to appear in my reflective surfaces, but this was quicklly resolved by setting the “specular scale” down to 0 in all my lights. This kept the scne bright, but left the lights themselves out of the reflections.

Il-lumen-ation

I’m actually new to using Lumen in Unreal for the Movie Render Queue, so I watched a few videos on Lumen settings. At first, my skeletal mesh was only appearing in reflections where the light was being reflected - leaving the shadowed portion of the character un-rendered in the reflections.

I was able to get my reflections working as-desired, and my lighting feeling pretty good with just a few adjustments to the project settings and the post processing volume

I rendered out to .EXR, customised my anti-aliasing using TAA with 16 temporal samples, and the Movie Pipeline Game Overrides to get everyhting to a higher quality.

Fun Issues

The first technical issue I ran into was using Lumen and Rectangle Lights. I turns out that larger attenuation distances on the lights would create duplicating after-images in the screen space. This was solved by keeping the attenuation small, and only using tese style fo lights to illuminate specific areas. Again, mostly just to enhance the look of bounced light in a scene.

The next issue arose with using particle effect in the render. I know the brief didnt call for particles, but I wanted to add some storytelling, and the particles were what came to mind. At first, they weren’t showing up at all. Then, once I got them to appear (by changing them to be spawnable via keyframes) -- they werent animating. Then, once I got them animating (by ensuring they wouldn’t go inactive until after the target render time) — they were only showing about 3 frames in the loop, instead of the full sequence.

It took a bit of digging, but what I discovered was an issue related to using Temporal Anti Aliasing in the render. With my Anti-Aliasing settings, I guess every TAA render counts as 1 tick, and these game-ready particle effects in my library would basically go through 16 ticks every frame to calcuate the TAA. So they were rendering every 16th, 32nd, 48th, etc, frame instead fo playing the entire animation correctly. By editing the custom time dilation settings, I was able to scale the Delta Time so that ticks were slower, which seemed to solve the issues.