Outdoor lighting Koola standard?

[tcla75]

Hi are there any tips you could give me or tutorials you could point me towards for creating realistic outdoor lighting. There is a lot of stuff on indoor lighting but what I want to do is have something that looks as good as koola’s work does.

Right now my game is very flat and boring looking.

[Maximum-Dev]

Up the sun intensity a little. I’d say something like 5-6.
Maintain a realistic ratio between lit and shadowed areas.
Use reflection spheres all around.
Don’t forget to create and apply a LUT.

Then the rest of the work is pretty much the textures/materials.

Edit: Don’t forget to use the Temperature option of the directional light. Set the color to white and then I’d say 5750 is a good temperature value to start with.

[starfighterdude (Bruno De Araujo)]

My 5 cents would be:

• The sky needs some work. Look at HDRI lighting for UE4, maybe that’s the way to go.
• The buildings are simple 3d meshes with simple textures. It’s gonna be hard to achieve a high level of realism with just that. Realism implies high quality models and extreme detailed textures.
• Some of the interior lights on the buildings are on, but that looks very artificial because you wouldn’t be able to see those lights at the time of day you are representing on your images. There should be a lot more reflection on the windows. Look for references like the following:

Pay attention to the reflections and shadows. It seems that the sun is setting but you still can’t see interior lights on the buildings.

• Check the asphalt material on the streets, it should be darker. There’s some water on the sides, and that’s cool, but that implies that the road is wet, and wet = darker.
• Add some point lights around the “Bloc” sign.
• You have a long way to go if you want to reach the same level of realism you see on Koola’s work, specially because your scene is huge. Maybe it’s a better idea to star with something smaller.

Cheers

[anonymous_user_6096f04f]

Make sure you are taking full advantage of the post processing volume, there’s a lot you can do after you get a good light level in your scene.

[anonymous_user_257eb834]

I think what makes Koola lighting looked like mental ray is the adjustment in the .ini file.

I don’t think it’s game compatible.

[anonymous_user_6096f04f]

@LoveTune;388885

I think what makes Koola lighting looked like mental ray is the adjustment in the .ini file.

I don’t think it’s game compatible.

I don’t know if that’s it. He has great texturing, good lighting and post processing. There’s plenty of control in the interface.

[tcla75]

Thanks some great tips there.

[anonymous_user_6096f04f]

I think I would try and make the sidewalk concrete a little lighter so there’s more contrast with the road asphalt too. Try and do the same with some of the building facades too - contrast is your friend.

[RumbleMonk]

Do you know what adjustments he makes? To be honest I’m with RI3DVIZ here - I don’t see him doing anything special apart from being careful with his choices and having a good eye.

I’d still be interested to hear if there’s something out of the ordinary one can do to improve things.

Cheers.

[anonymous_user_6096f04f]

Do you know what adjustments he makes? To be honest I’m with RI3DVIZ here - I don’t see him doing anything special apart from being careful with his choices and having a good eye.

I’d still be interested to hear if there’s something out of the ordinary one can do to improve things.

Cheers.

He even said he doesn’t know what the tweaks in the .ini file did! Hahahaha I think a little more control over textures would be good, like bump maps, hue/saturation/contrast/brightness in one node. Maybe those exist somewhere, I’m new to the program.

[anonymous_user_416b781b]

Again, I would like to subtle direct to a comprehensive link: itchy animation - quirky illustration and characters by Richard Yot

[heartlessphil]

Usually for small arch-viz scenes we use very high poly assets (vs baked low-poly for games) and high-res textures, high-res lightmaps (and uncompressed). I personally have meshes with a lot of vertices for vertex painting too. Performance is less of an issue because we don’t need to craft huge worlds with characters, dynamic objects, game logics, A.I etc. We can use all our hardware ressources on visuals. You’re never going to make a playable game with the visual quality of a high end arch-viz scene. Not now at least!

[starfighterdude (Bruno De Araujo)]

I’m 100% with here. Scale is a big topic when it comes to Archviz realism, and to render a full city scene, make it playable with characters, game logics, etc., would be something very hard to achieve.

[darthviper107]

For large exterior environments you’ll also want to have fog which will help make the scale more realistic

[tcla75]

Thanks again for the help. I implemented a few of your suggestions. It didn’t bring my project up to Koola’s standard lol but it does now look a lot better.