Phantom Culprit: Lighting and Materials

The Lighting

Lighting and materials play a massive part in the immersion of a player into the game world. I read articles published by Epic themselves on how the lighting system works in the Unreal Engine and the best techniques to light each part of the level.

  • Static, Stationary and Movable lighting - (detailed in Phantom Culprit: Level Creation)
  • Materials and their properties - PBR materials (detailed at the bottom of this post)
  • Reflection spheres - capture and reflect light in a lighting build
  • Post processing - edit lighting, bloom, colour grading, camera effects 
  • Exponential height fog - dense fog with light scattering
The reflection sphere captures the light from outside the windows, the ceiling lights and the emissive light from the vending machine then reflects that lighting to the surroundings. The floor has a shiny reflection compared to the rougher walls.

The Materials

The second part of a great lighting setup is PBR (Physcially Based Rendering) materials. Each of these materials are made up of 4 textures, A diffuse, roughness. normal and ambient occlusion texture. This gives a material accurate, lifelike shading properties, making light bounce off and reflect in a realistic way.

The lighting in the left hall, one of my favourite parts of the level. The lights bounces of each material with different properties. The metal air ducts shine brighter where as the plaster wall shows its cracker and rougher surface. The skin on the characters use a subsurface scattering profile, created by Epic, to give skin realistic lighting properties.

All materials I used, apart from the ones I created in Substance Painter, are made by CC0 Textures, a license free PBR material site. It's a great resource for students or indie developers without an artist.

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Phantom Culprit: Character Creation

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