Week 11 – Day 2 – “Colours and Lighting in UE4”

Today we did something really cool, and we looked at Post Process Volumes in Unreal Engine 4. Post Process Volumes are exactly what they sound like – Volumes in which we can adjust the post process effects of our games. The good thing about UE4 as opposed to Unity is that they are bound to a box by default, so you can easily trigger a post process effect by simply walking into a volume. In Unity, they were either on or off without code.

There are a couple of notes I thought were really important:

• Priority – you can set the priority of overlapping Post Process Volumes
• Blend Radius – This is the fade of the Volume outside the box. 0 is a sharp transition.
• Scene Colour – gives us the ability to adjust the colour grading, like in Unity.
  • Fringe Intensity is basically like chromatic aberration, where the colours spit at the edges.
  • Colour LUT like what we used in Unity, can be brought into Photoshop and adjusted to alter the colour grading of our scenes. The LUT is found on Unreal’s Docs ( LUT Texture Example ). NB : Make sure you change the texture group to “Colour Lookup Table”.
• Anti Aliasing – The fringing of harsh edges. This is combatted in Unreal by default, but can be changed as a post process. “Temporal AA” is the best but most expensive to run in game.
• Bloom – Simon says (!) it is a very overused effect, and to use it with caution.
• Depth of Field – Same thing, be wary of overusing, but a little is great! You can visualise the depth of field by going to Show>Visualize> Depth of Field. BokehDOF has a really impressive look, in particular, but is more expensive than Gaussian.
• Ambient Occlusion – Screen space ambient occlusion isn’t baked, like what we have looked at already. It helps to add depth by highlighting cavities and joins.
  • Static Fraction – basically, the quality.

 

Then we went on to test light a scene, and I also painted the textures for two of my room assets – The Ceiling Fan and the Table Jukebox.

The ceiling fan was pretty straight forward. After baking my ZBrush model onto the low poly in Substance Painter (again, using the _high _low method) I painted it in Substance painter. I created shiny painted surfaces for the blades, created a very shiny and smooth glass-like material for the bulk and then created a rough and aged metal for the motor area. I then created a basic Emissive texture for it, but when I brought it into UE4 it didn’t look great, so that will definitely need more work. 

I then went on to texture the table jukebox, which was a really cool and interesting model to paint. Again, I baked using the _high _low method, and the result was pretty good. I then added an opacity channel to Substance Painter where I created a glass texture for the front of the jukebox . I then painted the “strips” on the inside of the glass. Because this was behind the glass, and you can’t hide in Substance Painter, I had to paint this detail on the UV channel as opposed to directly on the model, but that worked very well. I then created an aged chrome-like metal for the main body. Finally I added some decals, like the keypad on the front, the logo on the glass, and the coin insert slot. The decals were created using wither a texture I created in Photoshop as a stamp or a stencil. I couldn’t find the correct font for the logo, so I created something similar in Illustrator.

The stamp used for the coin slot

The tracklist ‘strip’ for inside the glass. I masked using this and then painted inside the mask.

My version of the Seeburg logo

The text I used as a stencil for the text on the keypad

 

Summary: We looked at Post Process volumes in Unreal Engine, and I baked and painted my Ceiling fan/light and the table jukebox.