Environment Lighting - Unreal Engine 5 course

• Level - Beginner / intermediate
• Duration - 3 hours
• Lessons language - English
• Instructor - Oleg Verenko

Unreal Engine 5 is one of the best software for creating cinematic content for several reasons. High-Quality Graphics: Unreal Engine 5 uses advanced rendering technology, including real-time ray tracing, to create highly realistic and visually stunning graphics. This makes it an excellent choice for creating cinematic content that needs to look as realistic as possible. Dynamic Lighting: Unreal Engine 5’s dynamic lighting system allows for realistic lighting in real-time. This means that lighting can change in real-time as the camera moves, creating a more cinematic and immersive experience. Motion Capture: Unreal Engine 5 has advanced motion capture capabilities that allow for more realistic character movements. This is especially important for creating cinematic content that requires realistic animations. Flexibility: Unreal Engine 5 is highly flexible, allowing for a wide range of creative possibilities. This means that filmmakers and game developers can use the software to create a variety of different types of cinematic content, from cutscenes to full-length movies.User-friendly: Unreal Engine 5 has a user-friendly interface and a large community of users. This makes it easy for filmmakers and game developers to learn the software and find support if needed. 

Unreal Engine 5 has a bunch of new lighting features. In this tutorial series, I’ll show you a few ways and techniques to make night real time-lighting for car cinematic videos. We’ll start from scratch – from models importing to bugs fixing and compositing in Nuke. We’ll be talking about basic lighting theory, camera setup, exposure, anamorphic DOF, lighting properties, Lumen, Nanite, Post Processing, dynamic global illumination, fog, renders with great composition, clean presentation and optimization for fast productivity.

In these lessons, you will learn everything you need to understand the basics and complex concepts of what makes a great composition, camera moving, lighting, and final cinematic video.  

This downloadable training series contains ~3 hours of essential training to help you get up-and-running with Unreal interface and tool set. Perfect for a beginner or any Unreal user who wants to work more quickly.

Hardware specifications for video rendering

Minimum: Processor – Quad-core Intel or AMD, 2.5 GHz or faster. Memory – 16 GB or more. Video Card – DirectX 11 or 12 compatible graphics card (Nvidia) with 8 Gb VRAM or more. 256 GB SSD (OS Drive).

Recommended: Processor – 8-core Intel or AMD. Memory – 32 GB or more. Video Card – DirectX 11 or 12 compatible graphics card (Nvidia) with 11 Gb VRAM or more. 512 GB SSD (OS Drive).

Performance: Processor – 12-core Intel or AMD. Memory – 64 GB or more. Video Card – DirectX 11 or 12 compatible graphics card (Nvidia) with 24 Gb VRAM or more. 512 GB SSD (OS Drive).

PC on which the training was created: GTX 1080ti 11 Gb VRAM, AMD Ryzen 9 5950x, 64 Gb RAM.

These course are for you if you want to

• learn how to work in Unreal Engine 5;
• learn the theoretical basics of lighting and composition;
• create different types of FullCG video and Cinematics;
• create environment, exterior scenes inside UE5;
• work with Visual Effects;
• setup render and make postprocessing inside UE5;
• fix bugs and make post in Nuke;

Technical specifications

• year of creation: 2023;
• author: Oleg Verenko;
• version of programs used in the course: Unreal Engine 5.1, Nuke 12;
• total lessons in the course: 13;
• total duration: 3h;
• size (materials and lessons): 3.53 Gb;
• video specifications: file type .mp4, frame size – 2560*1440 pixels;

About the author

Oleg Verenko – CG Generalist.

Hello! I’m a Senior CG Artist and visual effects creator working on commercial, television, cinematic and feature projects. While working many areas of the VFX pipeline, I specialize in 3d modeling, FX, compositing, procedural systems, scripts, tools, and dynamic simulation of particles, liquids, smoke, fire, rigid bodies, and destruction. 

Course content

A total of 13 videos are split into different sections that build on one another.
All the videos will have logical naming and are numbered to make it easy to find exactly the ones you want to follow.

0.0 Course introduction. 

01. Starting the new Project and new level. Basic lighting using Skylight with HDRI.

02. Migration assets and shaders between projects.

03. Cinematic creation pipeline.

04. Main assets setup (accelerated video).

05.Cameras and character setup. Level sequencer.

06. Post Process Volume.

07. Environment creation (accelerated video).

08. Lighting setup.

09. Rendering setup. Movie Render Queue. Cryptomatte pass. Console variables.

10. Fast VFX – camera shake, air dust, fire, smoke.

11. Fine tuning.

12. Postprocessing in Nuke – bugs fixing.

13. Postprocessing in Nuke – color grading, camera effects, optical flares, finalizing.