This sprint consisted of gathering all the clips together, lighting and rendering them, and stuffing them all together into one video. I wish I had more time to put this all together, but alas, some items were not delivered on time. What can you do? It's no matter, I was at least able to work around some things in the mean time.
Here are shots from the clips I'm preparing:
For this initial shot, I aimed to blend the lantern's light, to not appear so spotty, and to pull the attention to the tori gate. I lowered the intensity of the lanterns, and increased the values of the lights by the gate. Wherever I could, I also tried to pull a gradual fall off of light. I also added fog cards in the background to separate it more from the foreground.
With this shot, I changed the original angle of the key light. Putting it behind him allowed me to work with more contrast to really let the muscle structure show. I also added a small red glow to his eyes, to draw the viewers eyes.
In this shot, I added some fake lighting to push out certain areas. There are lights with gold accessories to show off it's shine and I added a bit of colored lighting to pull out the blues of the Raijin's skin. I made sure to do it very delicately as too not look too obvious or unnatural, and ensure that her blues still registered in between orange and red lighting.
This sprint I needed to focus on lighting and set dressing.
With a couple changes in our scope, it did give me a couple blockers that pushed me a bit behind schedule. I should be spending the rest of tonight and tomorrow morning getting in some final touches, now that everything for this week is in engine.
I swapped out all the rock and lantern white boxes for models from a Japanese asset pack, and tweaked a bit of the global illumination.
This sprint I was mostly focused on the level sequencer. I wanted to get the sequence as close to finished as I could, so for the rest of the project I can put most of my attention towards lighting.
I finally got independent lighting set ups through the use of sub-levels. The process is as follows:
With the Levels window open, open the drop down menu and click "Create Here"
After naming the sub level, right click on it, go to Change Streaming Method >> Always loaded
Then, within the shot you're lighting, click Add, then add a Level Visibility Track
Once added, right click on the track for level visibility and go to Properties >> Level Visibility >> Level Names. Click on the plus button to add an element, then type the exact level name of the lighting sub level.
In its current state, the lighting will still be visible in other shots. So we have to right click on the level within the levels menu again, and click on Change Streaming Method >> Blueprint. We're now essentially telling Unreal that this levels visibility is dependent on being triggered by a blueprint, or in this case, our level sequencer.
Now it's no longer visible from other shots! It's worth noting however, when reloading a project, all of the lighting will turn on at the same time, so you have to turn the visibility off. I saved a bit of time with this by creating a folder for all lighting set ups.
Next I added in camera movement and started testing render times. I started with the movie render queue settings that were used with Secret Level, and it took about an hour. Here are the results from that render:
It looks a bit silly from the "clown" lighting I added to double check that the lighting is only on in certain shots. Using ostentatious colors helped me know for sure that the lighting wasn't staying on.
