Gladiator Lighting, Shaders and Presentation
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Following
the completion of the modelling, texturing, and rigging of the character, it is
time to light and present the character.
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Presentation
is crucial step in the project as the lighting and any extra effects or
background can drastically affect the quality of the result. A bad model can
still look good with good presentation, and a great model can look terrible
with terrible presentation.
Lighting:
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I
imported the character and the textures I had into unreal to yield the result
below. The natural light set up in unreal washed the colour out completely, and
I realised I did not set up a map to define what areas of the model are
metallic. To do this, I gave my texture map an alpha and plugged that alpha
into the metallic node, so the gladiator could have interesting material
shading.
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I made a very
crude box with flat planes on all sides and made a simple brown material to
colour the planes. I removed the fill light, and I rebuilt the lighting to show
my character in complete darkness.
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I used
the resources from black board to assess the lighting. The lighting set up I
wanted to use was the lighting with colours, producing defined rim lights as
well as helping to saturate the colours of my character in unreal.
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The
lights were split into 3 key types:
o Key – This light is the brightest
light in the setup, used to make the scene’s form more obvious. Moving this
light can drastically change the shadow shape and intensity, leading to changes
in mood.
o Fill – This light acts as a
contrast controller for the light set up. It is typically the lowest intensity
light, and acts as a mood controller also as this light implies the environment
around the character (such as time of day, indoors vs outdoors). This light
often has a colour added to it to further build the characters environment.
o Rim lights – This light creates a
more visible silhouette to the image and is usually of medium brightness. It sharpens
the image and can show the overall shape of the object.
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These 3
create create a 3-point light setup:
o A 3-point set up is used most
because it creates a clear 3-dimensional view of the subject matter for the
viewer, as well as providing a deliberate source of light for the viewer to interpret and understand.
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I used
the reference to set up lighting of my character initially in the same colours,
and then changed the colours slightly to create a warmer colour scheme. In the
final version, the fill light was toned down a lot more to push the background
back, and I added a warm top-down light which made the character look sunlit.
The green became the rim light of the image, and the fill became a warm orange
to compliment the skin tone of my character and to saturate the colours better.
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I have
had issues before with the auto exposure in unreal, so when lighting my character,
I added a post process volume and adjusted the project settings to limit the intense
shine coming from the metallic armour in the scene. I followed this tutorial to
make sure I did this process correctly: https://youtu.be/Q1xi8NwpIqA
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Import |
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Lighting Set up |
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Red and blue tinted lighting |
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Green and Orange tinted lighting |
Edge Shading:
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As an
extra push to add the borderlands style edge shading I had begun to add to my
textures, I looked at a couple of tutorials. I followed one (https://www.raywenderlich.com/92-unreal-engine-4-toon-outlines-tutorial)
for the first few steps to create a
basic dark outline of the character, then stopped when it referred to Laplacian
edge detection. This was something I would have done if I had time, but it
would take me getting a lot more confident in unreal and learning about post
process materials and blueprints to do, so I left it as a simple black
duplicate of my character set with a material to create the edges.
·
I wanted to
see if there were any simpler methods/videos to follow on this, and I found one
which led me to this article. This article (http://blog.theoroy.com/2017/04/27/anime-look-cel-shading-in-ue4/#Laplacian-Filter)
had a full set of images showing each
blueprint, material and how it all connected – so I attempted this. However, I
ran into an issue where it started adding strange flat grey areas to the model
as shading which I did not know how to fix, so I reverted to just my simple
duped outline to create the edge detection.
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I hope to
investigate edge detection again at another point, since it seems like a cool
way when in combination with cell shading at creating an interesting style
commonly seen in games like borderlands, so I may look into this over the
summer.
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I thought
the result for now was quite nice, and made the character appear like a
stronger focal point to the scene than without.
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Initial outline |
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Outline with post process material |
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Adjusted lighting and outline |
Final Presentation:
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Finally,
I took a series of high-resolution screenshots and created a final collection
image that shows the character from various poses below. I also gave her a
name, a title, and some text describing the project and the budgets for the
character.
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All three
images came together quite nicely to show the details of the character off, and
to show the design well. I did submit the individual pictures also.
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Final Presentation |
Final Conclusions:
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This
project has felt like an uphill struggle. I have had to learn a few new
processes that have taken some considerable time; I am happy I now know these
processes. I think this project really came together at the end with the
different stylisation and the lighting being added to the character since
before then I definitely had a love hate relationship with Minerva.
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I came
well below the tris limit for this character which really surprised me, I actually struggled more with the texture size limit than the tris count. I could
have added a helmet to my character, but I think this result helps show off her
face, hair and forehead circlet as well as stops the character from becoming
extremely top heavy with a super detailed chest plate, shield, and shoulder
details. I think she reads as a gladiator, the leather accents do great at
making that part readable, and the scars on the exposed skin help show she is
not a heavily clad knight.
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I will look
forward to not having to hand texture a character again because after a certain
point my photoshop document saved really slowly and would no longer update on
the models anymore; I had to reimport the texture every time I wanted to save
despite it being a photoshop file not the TGA file, so hopefully using programs
light substance will make the texture process a lot more enjoyable in the
future.
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