Setting up a three-point lighting system - Unreal Engine Tutorial

- [Narrator] Given that working in the dark isn't typically speaking a pleasant experience in many areas of life. The very first thing that I tend to do once I have the basic geometry setup in any kind of 3D scene is add some light by which I can work. In this template building exercise, though, we want to take that idea one step further and build a flexible, three-point lighting setup that could actually be used in many production situations, starting first of all, with the placement of our key light, coming to the light section of the place actors tab then, let's left click and drag in order to drop a rectangle light into our scene. Now, depending on your lighting preferences, we could just as easily use a point or spotlight here, given that the unreal versions of both of these are flexible, and powerful enough to be used on many types of product shots. As we are deliberately setting this template up to be as photographic in nature as possible though, we're going to stick with an area light as this will allow us to hopefully create something of a soft box type effect in our shot, should we want or need to. Again, the settings that we use in a template will very much depend on the type of products that we are visualizing, but to set up the key light for this vintage movie camera, I'm going to come to the transform section of the details tab and with the light still selected punch in location values of 17.5, 63 and 60, along with rotational settings of zero, 300 and 275, which if we jump into lit mode in our viewport now, should give us a key light that produces angled shadows coming across the face of the camera from the lens assembly. Let's also tweak just a few of the light settings that we have here, simply because the setup of these will again, depend upon the type of assets that we will be bringing into the scene. And of course, on the exposure settings that we want to use, whether this be on our cameras or in the post-process volume. To that end, let's go ahead and open up the advanced rollout then, and make the switch from using Candela's as the lighting unit of choice to lumens, simply because we can then make an easy intensity correlation between the lights that we have set up here in Unreal and any that we may have been using in our 3ds Max and V-Ray scene. In this instance, I'm going to have the key light output a value of 300 lumens, which gives us a radiant power output of about 0.45 Watts. As I want to create a somewhat contrasted looking image, let's set the width and height values for our light to seven and five centimeters respectively. And then also add a band or angle of about 25. Now, of course, with no exposure setup as of yet, things are looking very over bright. And so if you want to get a viewport only preview of the final exposure level that I will be aiming for, then you can quickly come to the view mode menu and in the exposure section, uncheck the game settings option, and then set the exposure value to around about five or six. Now we may want to come back and tweak both these and other settings on our light a little later in the chapter, but for now let's leave our key set just as it is and move on to adding the fill lights that we also want. Although actually, let's just make a final tweak here by renaming the light in the world outliner to light, underscore key, to add our fill lights and complete the basic three point light setup that we want, let's drag and drop two more rectangular lights into the scene, and then immediately rename those to light underscore right fill, and light underscore left fill. In terms of placement with the right fill selected, let's come to the details tab and enter location values of 135, 90 and 30. And for the rotation settings, zero, zero and 200, we will again switch over to using lumens as the unit of measurement and set the intensity value to 150, with width and height settings of 40 by 40 centimeters. If we then quickly hide the key light in the outliner, we can easily see the effect that this one light is currently having on our scene. With the left side fill selected next, we can run through a very similar process. Only this time, setting location values of minus 165, 125 and 50, along with rotation of zero, zero and 320. After switching to lumens, let's again use and intensity value of 150. And again, set the width and height values for the rectangle two 40 by 40 centimeters. Which, with the other two lights enabled or unhidden in the scene, gives us a pretty decent generic setup for a solid product type shot. If we work with different product types, of course, then tweaks will need to be made according to the specific lighting needs of that product. For example, translucent or transparent objects may benefit from having a fill or even a key light that comes from behind the object in order to show off its material properties. The main principle that we want to take away from this video though, is the fact that we will need to think carefully about the type of work we mostly produce and then create a basic light setup for that. But without getting caught up in any of the details at this point in the process. As it is very much connected to lighting, the final thing that I will do here is come to the visual effects section of the place actors tab, and then drag a reflection capture sphere into the scene, placing it just in front of our product geometry. So location values of zero, 60 and 20. Now this won't always be needed of course, but if we have areas of a reflective product that has say, deeper recesses on it, then this reflection capture probe can just help the reflections display a little more accurately. And with that, we can leave our lighting as it is for now and move on to adding some extra cameras into the scene. Just in case we want some shot variety. Though if we wanted to get a better feel for how the lighting that we have created here does look, then we could set the lighting build options to production, and then go ahead and build the scene lighting. As we will be tweaking our light mass GI settings a little later on in the chapter though, I am just going to leave things as they are for now and move quickly on to the next exercise.