Testing out Lighting Methods and Settings
Now that I have talked a bit about lighting, I want to start testing out these methods so that I know what I will be doing when it comes to my main project.
Intensity
Light intensity is exactly how it sounds, how intense the light will be, low intensity gives of a soft lighting effect whereas high intensity gives off a harsh bright light effect which can be seen in the image example below:
Colour
The Colour setting also does exactly what it says, by changing the colour through a colour picker, the light then emits a tinted light. I noticed that when I built two lights mixing, they didn’t mix like I expected, as Yellow and Blue create Green, which in this case didn’t happen.
Attenuation Radius
Attenuation Radius defines the distance in which the light can reach from its source, which can be changed within the light settings. In this case, as can be seen below, when the light has been moved away for the environment, no light is cast, but when it has collided with the environment, it will then cast light where it is overlapping.
Source Radius & Length Settings
I didn’t manage to successfully test this out within my own scene, but from information found from the Unreal Engine documentation, Source Radius & Length change how lights are seen in reflections, as can be seen below, with Radius and Length set to low, the reflection is soft and hardly visible, but when set higher, the reflection becomes more visible and shaped.
Shadow Casting
Shadow Casting is an importany part of lighting within games, as to make the world feel real and immersive it’s going to need shadows. Depending on the type of lighting style used such as; Movable, Static, or Stationary, can have an effect on how shadows are formed, or react to other objects and light.
For example, because Static lights render bake both light and shadow onto the surrounding area, they will usually not be able to be change dynamically if another factor has entered the area, unless the scene is re-rendered out, as can be seen in the example below I rendered out lighting when I placed a sphere into it’s path to cause a shadow, after I then moved the sphere and the result is that the shadow is still there.
Depending on Settings the shadows cast from two or more lights can also be rendered wrong as can be seen below, there seems to be two separate shadows being cast of the sphere from two different lights.
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