Type: Solo
Project Length: 3 Months
Skills:
Tools:
What was the goal?
This was a project for a lighting focused asset class in school. Given a map in Unreal, I was tasked with lighting the map to fit a film noir setting, as well as program a camera system so the player could view different shots of the map.
What was the output?
After brainstorming and compiling a mood board of different film noir media, in order to achieve a film noir look, I decided to make the entire map black and white, except for objects that are red. I applied a simple filter that excluded any objects that were red in order to achieve this. I also added this animated rain effect to the windows by programming a normal map material.
After the map looked the way I wanted, it was then onto adding some camera shots and UI. I placed some cameras and hooked them up to a UI I designed, meant to look like police bodycam footage; since this was film noir, I wanted it to look like a police investigation.
I then further delved into this investigation vibe by adding sounds across the map, including distant sirens near the door, and rain by the windows, and crying behind a bedroom door. I then programmed the UI to play all the cameras one by one, allow the player to pause, play, fast forward and rewind, as well as flip between different cameras, which were designed to look like different video files.
Takeaways
It was really cool to see the map transform so drastically simply with lighting and sound effects! The map was originally taken from What Remains of Edith Finch, so looking at it at the end and thinking about how it was the same map was quite strange. I learned a lot about lighting with this project, and also further enhanced my coding abilities in Unreal and my UI design skills.
