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Ugh, lighting. The bane of my development existence. That and environments got a lot of attention over the last few weeks. It's been a wild ride, and, at times, I was questioning why I decided to take the plunge into UE.
Lighting
This is always a struggle. Daz Studio, my old rendering software, has its own limitations with a lot of noise at low lighting conditions. For Unreal Engine, you've got multiple options for lighting your scene, apart from the "physical" lights themselves. Lumen, ray tracing, etc. are all options. I've gone the Lumen route, but it was this past month where I decided that I needed to get my lighting fixed up. Early previews were alright, but not looking as nice as things did before. These are the times I really love how quickly Unreal Engine can spit out renders, and this was never more needed then since I had to do a lot of testing to get the right balance.
I've now got different lighting sets that I just need to align and position with my character(s) that I want to light. There are dark and dramatic Rembrandt, high key, low key, loop, and many more options. This allows me to quickly setup the lighting I need for a scene and just make small adjustments to get it correct. I also corrected some render settings in UE that were causing abnormally dark shadows.
And this is another area where UE shines. Not only do I have these presets, but I've set it up with blueprints so that I can control most of the light settings from a single list of options. I can even key these settings in my animation timeline to change them. Cannot get better than that for easy setup and adjustments.
Is my lighting perfect? Nope, but it meets my personal tastes and consistently makes the characters look good. That's all I need. Oh, and being able to correct it easily when it gets wonky.
Environments
Taking my old environments into Unreal Engine proved to be very problematic, especially since I'm using Lumen lighting. Lumen hates flat planes, which is how most walls, floors, and ceilings are done in Daz Studio (and in a lot of other software too). If you use flat planes, Lumen exhibits color bleed. Let's say you have a red wall. Light in 3D and the natural world bounces around. So it will pick up some of that red and project it into your scene. That isn't a problem. But with color bleed, that effect is exaggerated significantly. You'll get characters glowing red in that scenario. Not good.
What I ended up doing for Chapter 11, since I don't need all the environments I've used so far, is use native Unreal Engine environments for nearly everything. A lot of these look a lot closer to how I wanted the game to look anyway (but lacked the assets and, at the time, a lot of the knowledge to customize). The few that are not UE native, got a nice little trip over to Blender to extrude these flat planes and create depth. That fixed those color bleed issues, and didn't affect performance at all.
More environment work is ahead after Chapter 11, but I've got a good system, and I'm very pleased with the new results.
Other than that, it has been character fixes, creating a few new characters I need for Chapter 11, and getting comfortable with the animation system in Unreal Engine. There are a number of things that are now complete (or close enough that only minor adjustments will be needed). Renders and animation work for Chapter 11 are ongoing now, and the final big hurdle is one that is only going to be solved with experience: high quality, fluid animations.
We've got an estimated release date of this fall for Chapter 11. Sorry I cannot get more specific than that, but I'm working in new territory every day, and I've already had more than enough challenges to solve. The upshot of all this is that individual renders, instead of taking around 10-20 minutes each to render out like they did before (that does not include setup time), now take around a second. Animations, which could easily take a day in Daz for something around 10 seconds, are just a few minutes now. This production improvement is one of the big reasons I've invested in this months long process to make this change. Future things like variation in clothing, hairstyle, etc. for characters, pregnancy options, as well as just additional scenes, will now be relatively easy to implement.
We are just getting started on this, and I'm excited to continue to improve things for all of you as I get more comfortable in Unreal Engine. A final reminder that the game engine itself is not switching to Unreal Engine. If your PC (or Mac) could run To Be A King before, it can run it after. All of the rendering is still taking place on my machine, and packaged as still images or video sequences (for the animations). Your saves will work just fine too. Now, if you'll excuse me, I better get back to work.
