This week I began thinking more in-depth about what I want to achieve with the lighting and how I am going to do it. One of the biggest problems I have had with lighting it parts of the environment being almost completely dark so I began looking at ways to address this. First I tried using global illumination to brighten the scene as a whole, I am reasonably sure that global illumination is a vital part of how Monster Hunter: Worlds environments are lit. It was effective but introduced new problems, predominantly it left the environment feeling washed out. Another method I attempted was to have an overhead light that was cast light across the whole scene, this overpowered the environment and drowned out all other light sources no matter how I tried to balance it.
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| screenshots from various iterations on the lighting. |
While there is still work to be done I feel the lighting is moving in the right direction, I've used the exposure settings inside the post-processing volume to brighten the scene up. I have also tried to draw a clear divide between the inside and the outside with interior lights leaning into warm yellows and oranges and exterior lights using colder blues and whites, in the same vein I also changed the skylight to imply a night time setting. I am unsure if I want to brighten the scene any further so I plan to seek out second opinions on the current lighting. I believe my next steps in the meantime will be to work on the colour balance and to experiment with LUT tables.
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| Current lighting set-up |
