I feel there is lack of actual advanced tutorials in general, not just about lighting.
There are hundreds (or thousands) of tutorials that cover the basics (and intermediate level) but very few advanced ones.
This is how it works with pretty much everything if you ask me, you learn the basics but then you have to practice and master the art yourself ![]()
The subject of lighting and shadowing and reflectioning (yes that deserves a category of its own :p) can get very complicated, not only there are many different kind of scenes and scenarios but there are many lighting systems in UE4 so you have to think about the different trade-offs as well.. some may be suited for archviz (lightmass baked stuff) some for dynamic scenes and day-night cycles, some indoors, some outdoors etc. and there are always little tricks n hacks that you can use to either improve or fake lights and shadows.
There will never be a tutorial which is going to teach you everything that there is to know about lighting!
Someone with a lot of experience would have to make an entire series of tutorials (we are talking many hours of content) with practical examples etc. to even begin to cover a meaningful amount. -If someone does this, kudos!
And even then lighting is still an art form just like modeling or texturing (IMO anyway) which means you need to practice it.
Here is a list with just the lighting options we currently have at our disposal:
- Lightmass GI - high quality baked lighting mostly for static scenes. Although there is Indirect Lighting Cache which can help with dynamic objects.
- Skylights - uses HDR cubemaps either scene-captured or imported (image based lighting). Used for static and dynamic scenes.
For dynamic scenes you have the option to blend between multiple cubemaps overtime, for example using one cubemap for day and one for night. - Light Profiles and Light Functions - can be used with directional, spot and point lights to achieve various effects and styles.
- Post Processing (Bloom, Ambient Cubemaps, Light Shafts) - PP can also greatly affect how a scene is lit.
- Emissive materials - you can fake lights with these but they can also be used with Light Propagation Volumes (experimental WIP GI feature) or VXGI to actually cast light to the scene.
Shadowing solutions:
-Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO)
-Distance Field AO
-Ray Traced Distance Field Soft Shadows
-Capsule Shadows (coming in 4.11)
And then there are WIP GI solutions to think about:
-Light Propagation Volumes
-Distance Field GI
-RyanTorant’s AHR
-nVidia’s VXGI
-Enlighten (this one is pricey)
Anyways! the point is that there is a lot to learn about all these different lighting systems and methods which makes making tutorials difficult or at least time consuming ![]()