Lighting

Lighting this environment was a lot of fun as I hadn't really lit a big environment since my 3rd year project. I feel like I really learned a lot when playing around with all of the different lighting effects and options in Unreal. A main one being how much a post processing volume affects the scene, (As I hadn't used this on my 3rd year environment) with options that change the gamma and contrast of a scene you can really get some wild looking results if wanted.

The first thing I did when looking at lighting my scene were real world references and also some references from what I think are well lit scenes of large environments in Games. I chose to look at how designers lit desert scenes and how towns light up at night in the real world, using these to help with my own lighting designs. I chose references from DOOM because of the environments being set on a dry alien world and also Assassins Creed Origins because the whole game is set in Egypt around desert environments. As for real world references I went with a small desert town called Huacachina in Peru, it's very similar in some aspects to my own environment, and there were pictures of it during the day and at night which helped a lot with lighting design work.

I chose to try 3 different kinds of lighting, a Day time scene, Suns rise/Sunset scene and a Night scene. The reason I chose to do all 3 was because I was enjoying lighting so much and after having focused on player decisions caused by lighting in my first semester I felt studying lighting as much as possible would link in well to my first semester studies. I also felt like I had managed my time well enough to have time to work on the 3 different lighting designs. I gave myself a week to focus on the lighting which I feel like was enough time especially because I was receiving feedback during the different iterations of the lighting as it changed.