Lighting, Reflections, and Postprocess - Building Worlds In Unreal - Episode 11

[@polar1991]

Makes the landscape look much nicer!

[@nk361]

This is the one tutorial I needed most and didn't even know it.

[@jbach]

Excellent overview Ben. Subscribed.

[@abilalp9104]

you are great artist Mr. Ben

[@plasid2]

"Wow" - Owen Wilson

[@Adama_Now]

"wwwwooooooowwww" - Owen Wilson

[@roendpunt]

Thanks for the video Ben!

[@BIGTTSNORLAX]

Thanks for the video! There's a lot to learn about lighting, and this content is helping!

[@BenCloward]

Yes, lighting is a very deep topic and I only just scratched the surface. Glad it was helpful!

[@davinderrehal13]

@@BenCloward is there any way to attach sphere reflection capture to a movable object such as a car to have dynamic reflection and make the reflection capture to update at every frame

[@unrealdevop]

Wow nice tutorial, never found one that covers reflection probes properly. The only times I've heard these brought up in other courses they just say their used to improve the reflections and that's about all they say about them. I had no idea that the sky would reflect through objects without them and that they were dependent on the camera height. Not to mention the Postprocess Volume. I've yet to see a video that explains it as well as you.

[@sergiogonzalez2611]

wonderfgull content thank you very much for share

[@gabrielepardi5178]

Great video... thank you

[@LoopSkaify]

Great video! Short correction: it's not that everything inside the post process volume is affected but as long your are within the volume you see the effect of the post process affecting your view. I am excited to see more videos of you 😊

[@BenCloward]

Thank you very much for the correction/clarification! I appreciate the help.

[@ConfusionWood]

great tutorial. thank you!

[@MR3DDev]

Would you say the reflection capture spheres are still necesary even when using real time ray tracing reflections?

[@BenCloward]

Currently, yes - for a couple of reasons. First, not everyone has hardware that supports ray tracing, so we're going to have to support a fallback for awhile until ray tracing support is universal. I think that will probably take another 3-4 years. And second, for surfaces that need multiple ray traced bounces to look correct, it's a lot cheaper to trace the first bounce and then fall back to reflection captures for additional bounces.

[@MR3DDev]

@@BenCloward Thanks for the answer that makes sense.

[@YASIR.K]

Thank you

[@joeshmoe3340]

Great vid as usual!! I'd like to make a request for your take on 'auto landscape materials'. Obviously there are a decent amount of videos that cover this subject, but your videos are always more in-depth and show a dev perspective aswell. I'd really like to see how you tackle optimization on this one as there are many ways to create this material.. and easily make it too bloated.

[@BenCloward]

Thank you - that's a great idea. The environment I'm working on right now is all hand-done - hand painted height map, hand-painted landscape material, hand-placed trees, etc. Once I'm done with this, I'm considering doing another environment series where everything is more automated and procedural. That would be a good opportunity to create an auto-material where the material placement is based on landscape altitude and slope.

[@islandonlinenews]

is there a way to simply turn off the sky relection so there is no blue glow in the level?

[@islandonlinenews]

I have certain materials that do the blue reflection like sidewalks. But the road material doesn’t do it. There must be a way to turn it off on the material.

[@islandonlinenews]

So in an open world I need hundreds of reflection volumes to get rid of the blue glow?

[@Twentyand1]

Question about the reflection caps. I was always under the impression that you want a large one that encompasses the area as a whole and then smaller ones within that. Does the number of reflection captures end up affecting performance in any significant way?

[@BenCloward]

I don't think the number of reflection captures will hurt performance. Each one of them takes a little bit of texture memory, so you'll be limited by that - but it won't slow you down to have dozens of them. Just don't add hundreds. :0) And yes, the strategy to have larger ones for big areas and then smaller ones inside those for places where you need more detail is a really good idea.

[@gursimransingh8726]

sir can you make a tut on full day and night cycle using new sky atmosphere system

[@BenCloward]

Perhaps in the future - but this is a very complex topic that will probably require its own series of videos. Not something I can cover in just one. Right now I'm just covering the basics, and creating a day/night cycle is definitely not basic.

[@pranays]

Hi Ben are you still planning on doing an episode on how you filled the gaps between the creek planes?

[@BenCloward]

Yes - next week! I'm doing a collab with tharlevfx! See the announcement here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/i6jckGmthsmgkJo

[@pranays]

@@BenCloward Thanks I'm just working on my first modeling demo in years and this series has been great. my weakness has always been my shaders.

[@nk361]

@@pranays He has a whole amazing series on shaders in UE4 and more for HLSL (which can be run in UE4)

[@Gamer-sv2mz]

great video friend . and what about the skylight ? what was the skylight state ? static , stationnary or movable ?

[@BenCloward]

I just used the default skylight that you get from creating a TimeOfDay level. It's set to movable.

[@Gamer-sv2mz]

@@BenCloward thanks friend. Why setting the skylight on movable ? I understund for directional light , but for skylight ?

[@BenCloward]

@@Gamer-sv2mz As I said, I didn't make any changes to the Skylight. I just made a brand new DayNight map. It automatically created a sky light, and I left it the way that it was. It's possible that it would be more efficient to set it to static, but I haven't tried that.

[@Gamer-sv2mz]

@@BenCloward thanks friend for your response ?

[@reffect5338]

Hi. Any ideas why the Water Material i reproduced out from your tutorial does not show up in Raytrace reflections? ;-)

[@A_B_M]

How to reproduce the effect of reflection capture on moving objects (for example, in the cockpit view of a car, when the camera is always at the same position, relative to the cockpit)? If i have the cubemap, captured to render target from the camera point, how to properly apply it to the interior materials?

[@BenCloward]

That's a good question. I would imagine you would need to attach a capture point to the car interior and set it to update when the camera position changes. I haven't done that before myself so I can tell you how to do it, but that's what you would need to do.

[@DKJens44]

nice tutorial thank you... can you make a Day and Night Tutorial with Moon and Sun?

[@BenCloward]

You're the second person who has asked for that in the past hour - so it must be something that people want to know how to do! Unfortunately, it's a complicated topic - one that will require a series of videos, not just one. I may do it in the future, but not in the next couple of weeks at least.

[@A_B_M]

There is a property of translucent materials, called "Render after DOF". It seems, that disabling this should solve the problem with the water, that is not blurred by DOF, but why is this property enabled by default? Is it expensive to disable or it leads to some other artifacts?

[@BenCloward]

Transparent objects have to be rendered in a separate pass because they're rendered with forward lighting instead of deferred. They're most expensive to render because they have to be rendered from back to front instead of front to back like opaque objects. Creating DOF for transparent objects is more expensive because it requires a separate depth duffer to be created, and a compositing step to happen for the transparent object and the rest of the scene before the DOF can be added. So yeah, I can understand why they would want transparents to not have DOF by default. I'll try turning it on and see what kind of performance hit I get. Thanks for the tip!

[@Bunny-hj5sf]

Wow ， so live QwQ

[@TNTMEKKI]

can you give me Episode? how to creat this water

[@BenCloward]

Sure! I did a whole series of videos on creating water. Here's the playlist link: kzbin.info/aero/PL78XDi0TS4lGXKflD2Z5aY2sLuIln6-sD For this stream water specifically, I talked about this in episode 9 of the series: kzbin.info/www/bejne/qF7VaZqdm6ubhLM Good luck making your water!

[@Smittel]

if only reflection captures could be dynamic, it would be like cheaper pseudo Raytracing if you parent it to the players camera

[@BenCloward]

It is possible to do what you're describing - but it's pretty expensive. The reflection captures are cheap because they're rendered just once and stored in a cube map texture. But if you have to render that cube map in real-time for every frame... Well, it's like rendering the scene six times to create the cube map before you can actually render the frame. That technique is often used in racing games for the player's car - because it's reflective and always moving, but they have to budget their performance for it very carefully.

[@Smittel]

@@BenCloward but assuming rarely any truly reflective surfaces, i e roughness >0, the resolution of the cubemap could be lowered accordingly, couldn't it? wouldnt be perfect, however that shouldn't be easily noticable. furthermore, what do the captures capture? do they render the same as the player would see it? the thinking behind it would be, if the reflection captures only render the raw color and the lighting information, ignoring everything else, at a potentially lowered resolution, the performance impact could be reduced, no? upside would be that reflections could be dynamic as well. only downside is that reflections of obscured geometry is not possible but thats what ray tracing is for. im trying to think of a way to really increase the visual quality of a scene without using ray tracing, or rather, leaving the option of ray tracing open to do other stuff optionally.

[@BenCloward]

@@Smittel These are all great thoughts! Yes, you would be able to reduce the cost of rendering the cube map every frame by reducing the resolution of the cube textures, rendering with simplified materials on your scene, rendering with lower LODs, and reducing the clip distance. All of these would help, but it still would be more expensive than not doing it. :0) So yeah, you could get good results by doing that, but you would have to cut other things from your performance budget in order to get it to fit. So by all means, try it!

[@Fritigern]

Should the reflection capture actors not be placed a bit closer to the ground rather than at the camera height? I think the objects on the ground need to reflect what they "see" from their low vantage point, no?

[@BenCloward]

No, the reflection capture actors need to be placed at camera height. They are capturing cube maps - which are a very simple recreation of the whole scene. Reflections are calculated using the cube map instead of using the whole scene. It's only a perfectly accurate representation of the scene at the location of the capture actor. So it's important that those points where it will be perfectly accurate match where the camera is going to be as closely as possible. You can test this out with a simple experiment: Create a simple square room with a smooth, reflective floor and a few other objects. Add a camera to the room that's about 6 feet off of the floor. Place a reflection capture actor at the same location as the camera. From the location of the camera, the reflections on the floor will look correct. Now move the reflection capture actor away from the camera position and place it closer to the floor. Be sure to regenerate the capture after moving it. Notice that the further away from the camera position the capture actor is, the less accurate the reflections look from the point of view of the camera. They no longer appear to line up with the scene. Hope that helps!

[@tranceemerson8325]

I don't like the depth of field, making my player near sighted isn't fair to them in my opinion.. saves FPS.. so I'll be turning it off in my scene.

[@BenCloward]

Sounds great! The main thing that the DOF does is create a separation between foreground and background. In two weeks, I'm going to cover adding fog (atmospheric perspective) to the scene - which can also serve that same purpose.