ArchViz / Lighting

[koola]

Hi everyone !

I wanted to test if i can do some "vray style" interior.
Here's my first test, i dont really like to model/uv stuffs so it's pretty simple.

[Jacky]

Awesome! You pretty much nailed it.

Is it a single directional light with a skylight or did you have additional spotlights at the window?

[oleg.budeanu]

Looks great , as i am architectural visualization artist by myself i admit that you did great work baking that lighting in. That was a lot of unwrapping, eh ?

[koola]

Thx !

For the lighting i have a spot that light a white quad at the exterior of the window (so no direct light/shadow, just smooth indirect lighting) and a directional for the sun.
I have also tweak the BaseLightmass.ini with totally overkill values^^.

And yeah, I dream of a "make perfect UV2" button


Here's another quick light test with just the spot/reflector :

[Jacky]

Aha! So you tweaked the .INI file, you sneaky koola. Seriously beautiful though. How long does it take you to build the lighting for this scene?

[koola]

It take less than 10min on a i7-3770.

[koola]

[koola]

[Jacky]

My jaw keeps dropping as you keep posting these. You should record a video next time!

[Errvald]

wow...most realistic render I've seen from a game engine. Your work is amazing, have you got any short video walk through from those 2 last scenes?

[Rakantor]

This looks awesome!
Very well done!

[Sean Gribbin]

WOW! This is fantastic! Great job koola. I know it keeps being said but I hope you are going to show us a video soon. Keep up the superb work!

[koola]

Here's a quick video
(First time I use Matinee, very cool and simple tool)

Seriously, the more I use this engine, the more I love it ! Great job UE guys

[Tom Shannon]

HOLEE SHIIIIIIT~!

O_O

Super-fantastic. Bravo. Simply genius!

[Errvald]

This deserves to be showcased by EPIC.

[ICO_hr]

Madness, this is madness...

Btw what tweaks have you done in BaseLightmass.ini to get this crazy good results?

[KoldKam]

Oh my flippity flippin' freaking gosh. This is the best architecture project I've seen made with Unreal Engine 4. #madskillz

[SE_JonF]

Beautiful work!

[Tom Shannon]

Couple of questions:
1) can you detail what you did to your Lightmass.ini? This would be invaluable for the arch-viz community to work from.
2) Did you capture the video directly using FRAP/Banidicam, etc? Or did you use the in-engine movie capture?

[koola]

Hey, thanks everybody !

For the BaseLightmass.ini I use this values (and I almost have no idea what each value does^^ ... it's totally random)

[DevOptions.StaticLightingProductionQuality]
NumShadowRaysScale=32
NumPenumbraShadowRaysScale=64
ApproximateHighResTexelsPerMaxTransitionDistanceScale=9
MinDistanceFieldUpsampleFactor=7
NumHemisphereSamplesScale=64
NumImportanceSearchPhotonsScale=6
NumDirectPhotonsScale=32
DirectPhotonSearchDistanceScale=.5
NumIndirectPhotonPathsScale=32
NumIndirectPhotonsScale=64
NumIndirectIrradiancePhotonsScale=32
RecordRadiusScaleScale=.45
InterpolationMaxAngleScale=.75
IrradianceCacheSmoothFactor=.75
NumAdaptiveRefinementLevels=3
AdaptiveBrightnessThresholdScale=.25
AdaptiveFirstBouncePhotonConeAngleScale=2.5

I capture the video directly with the movie capture tool in Matinee.

[koola]

A little preview of the next scene

[Paul Lyon]

*Picks jaw up from floor*

That matinee walk through was amazing!

[Tom Shannon]

Now, yer just showin' off.

[Bychop]

A little preview of the next scene

Tree's bark looks flat. Do you have a Normal map?
Otherwise, wow.. fantastic job! It's crazy!!

[HAI]

wow, Beautiful work!

[Hackmet]

Incredible artwork!!!
Can you give us some breakdown of your materials? How do you approach such a scene? How do you set-up the lighting? IAM CURIOUS!!!!

[koola]

Thanks again.

I do nothing complicated, like I said, I don't like modeling and uv(ing?) so all is pretty simple

I don't explain what I do very well so I hope this image answers your questions :

[xrouter]

No words...jaw officially dropped

[moritzw]

Stumbled over your Video and instantly getting hooked on UE4 again Great work, keep it up! Also looking forward to a downloadable Demo of your Classroom Flythrough

[Froyok]

Very nice work ! I really like the lighting.
I would have never thought about using white plane to boost the lighting with nice GI, that's clever.

[devel.bmad]

This is really amazing! :-) Is there any way to achieve this result keeping the quads outside of the window invisible? (in an interactive 1st person visit they would be visible outside of the window in your case, isn't it?)
What kind of strength did you use for the sun and for the spotlights?
Did you also tweak indirect lighting quality from the world settings or the indirect lighting contribution intensity for your lights?
Sorry.. many questions, but your work is really inspiring for us all :-)

[devel.bmad]

..and one more question: why didn't you just pointed the spots toward the window? are you getting softer shadows this way?

[koola]

Thanks everyone

You can hide the quad in game with the "Actor Hidden In Game" option in the Rendering tab of the object.
I use a intensity of 6 for the sun and 16 for the spots, depends of your auto exposure. For exemple I used 1.0 for Min and Max Brightness (so no auto exposure) and 0.5 for exposure bias.
No tweak on the lights.
In the world settings I just set the number of bounces to 100 (max) and slighty decrease the indirect lighting smoothness (0.8).
I have not even try with a spot directly at the window, with some tweaks maybe it works ... the reflector thing seemed logical to me

[Jacky]

the reflector thing seemed logical to me

Reflector mesh works and it is a good idea actually. Back in UDK emissive materials worked with lightmass as light sources so you could use a plane with emissive material on it to do what you are doing without using any lights. Now it requires a bit more work to place additional lights but the result is well worth it as you've been proving.

Thanks for sharing the INI settings, btw!

[devel.bmad]

Thank you for sharing your settings :-) looking forward to see more of your works!!

[moritzw]

Update: I tweeted the Video with the link to this thread and Mark Rein (VP of Epic Games) and the Official UE Twitter Account already retweeted it
https://twitter.com/moritzw/status/499549066758733824
I wouldn't wonder if you get featured in the next twitch broadcast...

[koola]

Huuuuu, nice, thank you ... that's too much

Here's a new quick video with some speedtree, hope you like it.




Edit : and a screenshot

[moritzw]

Oh yes.. So you are the man for a "The Third and the Seventh" Remake in UE4.. Love your output and will look forward to some more in depth breakdowns/tipps. Thinking about getting my hands on UE4, too...

[oleg.budeanu]

Koola , that looks really cool !
Can you share the setup of last scene with trees - material of trees and lighting ? I am working now on trees crowded scene and have some problems with lighting there
Thanks

[devel.bmad]

Great work Koola! Really reminds me the style of "The Third and the Seventh"