Environments 2

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Environments 2 - Synced to students

Week 03: Color & presentation

Color Theory

Composition and lighting will get us far already. But what is a scene without any color? Let’s talk colors.

Orange & Teal

Orange and Teal, probably the most used color scheme. Look at the image below. You see two colors: orange and blue.

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Over time this color scheme has proven to be very affective at giving a nice contrast to the image and they work well together. Ofcourse, there are many more color combinations than orange and blue.

Complementary scheme

Analogous scheme

Triadic scheme

Quadtric scheme

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Have a look at the color wheel of Adobe, it is handy:

https://color.adobe.com/nl/create/color-wheel⁠

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Think about the story you want to tell. Is it a joyful/fluffy world? Or is it very eery and scary?

→ This will have an impact on the color palette you will be choosing.

Color Wheels

Yeah, you read that right. There is more than just one color wheel. We will keep it to three:

RGB CMYK RYB

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Emotional color wheel

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First of all, we won’t use the CMYK wheel. This is used for printing purposes. RGB is most used and known. Difference with CMYK: RGB is additive, CMYK is subtractive. Now, the third wheel, RYB. This color wheel is mostly used in traditional art/painting and design. Sometimes, this can be interesting to see the relationships between the primary colors. We will use RGB, but never hurts to look at other wheels.

Temperature

So we have color and their wheels, but we also have temperature. With this I mean temperature in lights, not in materials/objects.

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If you notice, it goes from orange to blue → Orange and teal

Light categories

We have three light categories:

Natural lights: Non-manufactured lights

Practical lights: Lights present in the viewer’s/camera’s eye

Dramatic lights: Lights to enhance the story more

Natural lights

Natural lights are:

Sun

Sky

Moon

Sun

The sun is represented as the directional light in Unreal Engine. It works as a distant light source, like in real life. Directional light is super handy as it we can manipulate the light quite extensively.

Now, the directional light lights everything. → Light blockers can do a lot to build more depth/keep it readable into our scene. (Think of clouds, trees, etc..) Keep in mind the sun will/can appear different in color as well. Piece of reality: the sun itself doesn’t change color, it is because of the atmosphere.

Skylight or HDRI

Sometimes a skylight can be enough, for stylized environments as you don’t want the irregularaties of an HDRI. If you go for a realistic scene/environment, use an HDRI. Otherwise your scene/assets will start to look flat.

Exposure/Dynamic Range

First thing we need to keep into account is the exposure range of a camera (DSLR) compared to that of the human eye. The bigger the range, the more flexibility and values we can work with when we are doing our post/color grading.

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Look at the example below, the difference between RAW footage and color graded footage. (Left: Color graded || Right: RAW footage)

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So we also need to expand our range in Unreal Engine, which we can do ;) . Work with your Slope and Toe in the Post Process volume.

Look Up Table(LUT)

With this we can color grade our environment/scene. Download the LUT below (this is your base) OR find it here:

https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/RenderingAndGraphics/PostProcessEffects/UsingLUTs/⁠

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You take your render/screenshot to Photoshop → Do your post (Curves, Saturation, etc.). → Drag these adjustement layers onto this LUT. → Save and import into UE. → Check compression of the LUT in UE. (Change Texture Group: World → ColorLookupTable) → There you go, we have a color graded scene.

Cinematics

KEEP IN MIND: KEEP IT SIMPLE AND NATURAL

We can take screenshots for our whole life, but it’s not going to get us far. If we want some moving shots (dolly shots, etc.), make a sequence of different shots, etc.. For that we’ll need a sequencer, a Level Sequence to be more exact.

In the Sequencer we can keyframe almost everything:

Camera settings (FOV, aperture, exposure, etc..)

Moving objects

Enabling blueprints

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Make sure your movement of your camerea is LINEAR

Once you are done with your keyframes, we can render out the sequence. You can use AVI extension to render out your movie.

Tick compression quality (75 is good) on, because otherwise you have a big file/video.

Exposure/Dynamic Range

Look Up Table(LUT)

Cinematics

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