Level setup - Unreal Engine Tutorial

As we work through this course together, our goal will be to gain as good an understanding as possible of the tools in Unreal that can help us get the best out of our lighting work. Specifically, in this instance on the global illumination side of things. Before we get into that though, there are just a few aspects of the level set up that we are working with here that need to be highlighted in order for us to understand just how things are working. So, for the lighting in the level, we have pretty much the same day-lighting set up that we would get when creating a new project from scratch in Unreal using the base first person template. Except, that in this case, we have reset all of the lighting and gi controls back to their Unreal defaults. All except that is the exposure that we are using in the view port because the eye adaptation values being used in our post process volume here have been set to zero point zero three. Which, essentially, gives us a decent base exposure for the whole scene whilst using the sunlights default intensity value. If at any time, though, you feel that the scene is looking either too dark or too bright for your taste, then do feel free to dial in some exposure compensation here in order to change that around with positive numbers brightening the scene and negative numbers darkening it. Coming back to the sunlight in the scene, another important factor at work here is the fact that this is being set up as a static rather than stationary or movable light. So, simply because the other two options either don't work at all with the light mass gi engine as is the case with the movable light, or they work with caveats in certain situations. As regards what is going on in the view port, if we come to the view port type dropdown, I'm going to be using the cinematic option in the recordings here simply because this gives us some nice framing on the shots that have been set up. Although, this again, can be altered at any time using the controls in this menu. In the build dropdown, the lighting quality that we will be using has been set to production, so that we can easily see how any options that we change are affecting the gi result that we are getting. Which, obviously, is not a work flow that we would necessarily want to use in a production setting, and, so, feel free to use the preview mode if you would prefer in order to speed things up as you follow along. We also have some bookmark set up in the view port here that we will be switching between as we work through the course with cycling through them being pretty easy as all we need do is use the zero to nine keys found across the top of our keyboard. And, finally, whilst the scene does have materials applied to all objects as seen, if I switch back to the lit mode in order to help keep visual clutter down as we work with the lighting and gi tools. We will be working with the view port set to the lighting only option, which, visually speaking, just gives us a plain gray material on all surfaces whilst in the background still working with and processing all of the applied materials in the gi calculations. Hence, the color balance that we can see from our wood floor material. As I'm sure you're eager to dive in and start using the global illumination tools in Unreal, let's end the exercise there and move on to taking a first look at Unreal's light mass gi renderer.