What I want to be able to tell through my environment is an area that looks and feels abandoned but you get an eerie feeling from the setup lights that are still on.

I particularly want it to look as if someone that is potentially dangerous or creepy, to make it seem like someone is still there but doesn’t know how to look after their house or the environment around them.

Progress

Basic blocking then starting to add detail.

After using assets to build the house

Lighting

I deleted all of the preset lighting that I had which left me with a pitch-black base I added directional light, sky atmosphere, skylight, and volumetric clouds. I used this tutorial here to help me get the right amount of darkness and atmosphere I wanted which was dark, grey, and foggy: Cinematic Lighting in Unreal 5 (Tutorial)

I used inspiration from the images below to help with colour and level of lighting I wanted:

I made sure that real-time capture was ticked in Skylight, the first thing I did was change the time of day by pressing Ctrl + L which allowed me to change the time of day to later in the evening when the sky is red from the sun setting, I tried to make it as low as possible since I kept getting reflections from the water which kept flashing at certain points.

In the directional light settings, I did a few things which the tutorial used including using temperature, cast shadows on the atmosphere, cast cloud shadows, which allowed for the atmosphere to have an effect on the environment, cast cloud shadows allowed the environment to be darker from the clouds casting a shadow over the environment.

The next thing I did was turn on the light shaft occlusion which adds softer lighting to the light that is hitting and of the environment, I left bloom off as it brightened the environment.

I added volumetric fog to the atmosphere and adjusted some of the settings so there was enough fog and fix the colouring in the post-processing volume.

The next thing I will add is the lights including candles and using minimal lighting.

References

Mattingly, B. (2017) Photo by Brandon Mattingly , Photo of person standing in forest during daytime photo – Free Angels rest Image on Unsplash. Available at: https://unsplash.com/photos/GGkRfTenyJE (Accessed: 25 July 2023). 

Balogović, B. (2019) Photo by Branimir Balogović , Forest trees photograph photo – Free Grey Image on Unsplash. Available at: https://unsplash.com/photos/yY66QAbGxq4 (Accessed: 25 July 2023).