Cyberpunk Environment:
I wanted the scene to have a dark sky, as seen in many of the previous cyberpunk examples I explored and so I changed the sky to night time.
This, however, left the scene looking extremely dark – to the point where you couldn’t even see the road.
To fix this, I had to manually place rectangular light sources for each sign, lamp post etc. Whilst this did take a lot of time, the realism it added to the scene cannot be understated.
In order to capture that realism, I also had to match the colour of the light with the sign.
Whilst I did have to place hundreds of lights manually, for similar sized screens such as these arcade machines, I could just copy and paste the light using Alt+Drag and just change the colour.
Once I had finished lighting the scene, I thought it looked good, however it felt as if something was missing.
I eventually figured out that the road texture was too dry, especially because there will be rain in my scene. Therefore, I adjusted the roughness value of the road to make it look wet.
This made the bright neon lights reflect nicely off of the surface, which creates a more accurate cyberpunk look.
For the car in my scene, I tried to utilise a lighting technique known as “blorange” – where the contrast between blue and orange is supposed to be aesthetically pleasing.
However, I wanted this to be incorporated naturally from light sources that would make sense and not just have randomly placed lighting with no source in the scene. So, the orange lighting comes from the fire on the car and the light blue comes from a nearby lamppost.
Volcanic Environment:
For my volcanic environment, there was much less lighting work to do as most of the lighting comes naturally from the lava’s emissive glow on the rocks. This already gives the lighting a natural and effective look.
However, I did want to experiment with some lighting, and so I made the sky dark like the cyberpunk environment. Much like the cyberpunk environment, some details then became hard to see and so I lit up objects such as the T-Rex skull for better visibility.
I tried to keep the lighting as natural feeling as possible by keeping the intensity of the light low and being careful not to place too many lights.
Unlike the cyberpunk environment, there aren’t many lighting opportunities such as huge neon lights. Therefore I had to be careful and selective of where I placed my lighting.