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Week 6: A Long week Of Lighting  Problems & Solutions, Lightmapping Problems, World Properties and PostProcessing Effects  Its a been a very long week, a lot of hours has been put in experimenting with lighting. The main template of the level is already done and i have enough quick models in my packages to scatter around the scene for rubbish & foliage. Lighting this scene has been extremely troublesome, Its never been clear to me how i would go about lighting this scene. My first instincts told me to focus on directional lighting coming across through the large windows placed around the side, using a technique with my alpha planes for glass i could create some interesting shadows along the floor, giving the sense of light direction and a really interesting result. This how ever was not as easy i thought. No matter what i did, my final builds always had extremely dark lighting. The only impressive result was the shadows baked on the floor. And the small bit of lighting coming from the large windows.   When I started building this scene i did at first think about creating the glass without an alpha but instead an emissive applied instead. This would create a glowing effect, the glass in the film shot is not particular transparent, its misty and dirty and the natural sunlight outside is making the window glow. I Have now transitioned to this method and i believe its working allot better. This how ever has now made me re strategise the  type of lights needed to my scene but i will get into this further below. Going back to the dark lighting i found out from some advice that it could be my lightmaps not correctly laid out or just horrendously applied. I found out about the texel shading and lightmap density view. I never understood what they were but now they make a whole lot of sense. Like the checker texture in Maya unreal demonstrates how well the lightmap UV’s worked. For all my work i have been using UDK’s Auto generate UV’s, i got rid of overlapping UV’s because I knew about the effect it would have but it turns out UDK is rubbish at generating second UV’s for lighting. When i found the texel and density view the grid was so poorly applied. Simple flat mesh like the floor was either stretched or squashed. So i had to relightmap every item I have back in Maya. This has now all been complete and reimported  Old Lighting, Alpha Windows With Directional Lights Change of lighting I got some great advice about the lighting for an indoor scene. It turns out the purpose of Lightmass is really for outdoor scenes. This may be a reason why I am struggling to light my scene appropriately. From here I'm going to continue building my scene with and without light mass and constantly compare between the both. Lightmass creates more complex shadowing, where as without lightmass shadows are going to be more harsh, this however will make build times a lot quicker. I recreated the window with an emissive texture as i mentioned earlier. With this UDK now has a feature where the emissive can be used an actual static light. Just by looking in the properties under lightmass and checking use emissive as static light. My world properties i had changed the bloom scale and emissive glow by 25%. This will create a stronger effect. My lighting has changed to more static lighting and a small amount of spotlights for sunlight direction from the window. The result are a lot better, I'm getting a lot more brightness and light blending than i did before. See images and compare yourself. I really want to create a volumetric style of light for the windows above, beams of light would give the player perspective of the main area, the area in the middle with the pods is the main walkway.  Demonstrating Lighting from emmsive, re-textured window World Properties  The use of the world properties is the link to the post processing console which determines how your scene is rendered, From here i have enable Depth Of Field, give a blur in the background. Also Have been playing around with Mid Tones and Saturation and shadow tones The Saturation values are key for my scene, as i said from the beginning this scene is will be greatly influenced by gears of war that uses a low saturation throughout the game to give that gloomy effect. I have followed this and i must admit it allows more light to come through and overall looks better.  New Lighting Next Weeks Task I did decided to quickly introduce the extensions of my scene, A reception area and a walk way. These are currently in Maya preparing to be lightmapped, the next couple of days this mesh will be texture fully and imported into UDK.  Thanks to Elliot and Nathan for advice