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Unreal Engine Previsualization

I've been fascinated by Unreal Engine's lighting capacity for a while now, and have been exploring the many different ways it can be applied to the lighting design industry. Whether it be in creating architectural visualizations, designing virtual concert rigs, working in a light lab on your computer, or creating realistic renderings for design projects before the rig is ever up in the air, I think Unreal has the potential to completely change the game of lighting design in many different ways.

Here is one scene rendering I've created with Unreal Engine for my upcoming show, The Moors. To create it, I took the untextured 3d set model given by scenig design and applied textures I created with concept paintings also provided by scenic design. I placed the set in a 3d model of the performance venue I already had drafted, and as a finishing touch I dropped in some human models created with Unreal Engine's Metahumans plugin. Now the stage was set to light, which I did with a combination of source four blueprints I made using their IES profiles as well as other basic lighting types like panel lights to replicate the cyc light fixtures. All told I made six renderings for six key moments in the show to present to the director and other members of the design team to give them a better idea of how my design would end up looking.

Here is a simple demo I prepared with some basic lights and a prebuilt human model. I made the incandescent source fours use real IES photometry data provided by ETC for as accurate a pool of light as possible, which I then controlled using MA3 OnPC. Unreal also supports GDTF functionality, making it remarkably easy to incorporate any light you want to visualize by simply patching it in.

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