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Giganta Re-lighting Comparisons
🕑 Added 2021-02-18 23:22:01 +0000 UTCWell the only things left to do for the video are to add in high Tier Patron names, fix mis-spellings, and balance the audio levels for everything! For now, I wanted to show the differences paying a bit more attention to lighting can make.
Now i'm no lighting expert but adding lights to the car and one big somewhat red light basking the building in the background, kinda like a villain with a spotlight on them, all seemed to work out for the better. Because the destructible road didn't want to update its lighting, I changed the road behind it to also be destructible so at least the broken lighting on them feels consistent. A new thing I learned from a free pack on the UE4 marketplace are these things called lighting profiles. So what they do is shape how the light... lights. Like a car headlight sends out light shapes differently than a lamp kinda thing. It's really cool and add a LOT of detail here.
And here we have a very good view on me screwing up the name in the back. I added random spotlights to the theater to hide the actual theater name behind the Patron and it also looked more theater-y in this sun-setting time.
Here I moved the cel-shaded lighting to make the face more pronounced and such. Quite a few post process and shadow color changes as well. I wanted to ground myself a bit more. Have the world be less ridiculously colorful and instead have those colors be like highlights. It really does make the image more vibrant instead of being vibrant with everything to make it look flat. The sky had so much more detail uncovered because of this approach!
So I realized today that I've entered a point where animating isn't entirely the focus anymore. I've reached simulation levels as the next thing to learn. Above, the first Obelisk was cracked with UE4 Apex Destruction. It go the job done, but not cinematically. More like for a game. The 2nd image the Obelisk was destroyed in Blender using an add-on called FRACTURE ITERATOR. In which... it made so much of the process so easy that I could freely cllick what I wanted to fracture when then it just does it. Then I can do it again and again. On top of that, I can control when a group of pieces fracture and it doesn't change previous animation. CRAZY powerful stuff and already gives great results. In order to export, I had to bake the keyframes and it had a 1-click button for that too! Moving forward with simulations, Blender is where all simulations will now be done. Especially since it's baked and there's no finger-crossing that Apex doesn't mess up or have random destruction flying at the camera. But all simulations will have to be done in a separate project because holy shit does Blender crash when i'm learning new simulation things. Also to save performance. But light physics like small objects getting knocked around can stay being done in UE4. Unless I come across those getting super buggy like for the tipping building. Then I could put it in Blender.
The added smoke really helps make this look brutal.
QUITE a few added things here! I added rubble pieces that were parented to the building and a shitload of smoke spawning as it gets picked up to mask how bad the chunks of building were. There's gonna be a lot of thick smoke in this vid but somehow I really like how it looks. I also added rubble to the bottom building to make it look like it was torn off. All this stuff exists inside before it even gets torn off but it look convincing!
This is when I realized how powerful lighting profiles are. I don't know how they work and I just slap some downloaded UE4 assets on them but they add some much visual texture to the lighting. Also there's some random rubble pieces in here. I could've deleted the floor in different areas and all that but this is good enough. Man did the post-process changes help this shot a ton.
Fun fact! The rubble on the left is exactly the same from the mid-section of the building that stays while the above gets torn off. Simply teleported it to in front here. The building in the center looks MUCH better with the replaced rubble on top of the floor areas. Looks good as a first try but i'm pretty sure floors aren't built like that.
It was too damn foggy before so i'm glad that the changes to exponential fog helped with this scene.
This is the biggest WOW to me! This feels more realistic and the colors that were sacrificed actually pop better here. I knew in my brain the lighting looked flat before but I couldn't put my finger on it until I studied a lot more on more natural lighting. So I think the future will focus on natural lighting but with elements of color brandishing it. It feels more impactful.
Oh, I added lighting to all the street lights! Remind me to delete that one facing the park though.
Some expressions changes on Ms. Marvel here because it looked like her face froze previously. Cool thing about having bones for facial expressions is that I could change everything using UE4's animation editor! Plus this look is a bit more smug.
