Dungeon Crawler Environment Art - Week 10: Lighting and Lanterns

In the final sprint for getting the project over the line I could see the importance of incorporating my lanterns which I had written down as a bonus feature, looking at my scene I felt this was actually crucial to create a vibe that was close to my original concept for the dungeon.

I did a quick search for gothic lanterns and already had a rough idea what I wanted to create from a sketch but wanted to figure out the connections to the wall ect, when comparing these two ways of connecting the lanterns i decided on the chain hanging one as I felt it would be a good excuse to reuse my chain asset and have a ridiculously long chain from a high ceiling that goes un seen in the top down view. I feel this would add a sense of vertical height into the map.

UV's stacked to make for more effecient use of space

baking errors i couldn't fix

Adding the material into unreal i saw that the emissive seemed quite weak so added a multiply node so that I could adjust the output when finalising the lighting for the lanterns.

I ended up testing up to multiplying by 500x for the emissive but settled somewhere around the 100 mark!

After doing this I then went back to my shrine and adjusted the same to bump up the emmisive quality for that as I felt it came through quite weak as well with the blue/purple eyes and the flame around the edge base.

When i was taking renders of the map I noticed the chains weren't long enough and I needed to double their size to give the impression of infinite chains to a really high ceiling.

Project evaluation

Overall I felt I had a lot of confusion and learning that happened around mid way through the term and understanding of trim process vs hero asset process helped me to then move forward. I felt I really enjoyed making materials and textures in substance and once I'd become confident transferring them into unreal I had a lot of fun. I spent a lot of time on my shrine and not all the detail came through from zbrush but overall I'm pretty happy with that as it was a centre piece of the dungeon. I wish I had made more time to create a turntable render but I will do this after submission now! I feel a key area I need to improve is UVing moving forward but I am happy with the end result of the dungeon!

Thank you for reading :)

Dungeon finished: