Relighting Breakdown | Subway Train

Making Of / 06 April 2021

Relighting was achieved by the use of cinematic cameras, sequencer and the render queue in Unreal Engine 4.
All post-process was done directly in the Engine with additional camera controls.
Reference is taken from The Evil Within and other various lighting styles. Here's a breakdown of this project. I'll discuss the Lighting and how this was achieved.

Final Render:


Reference:


I've taken reference and inspiration for this project from such horror classics. Amongst others, the main influence of this project was 2014 The Evil Within and the work from Sergey Tyapkin, a known artist I've been following for a quite awhile now.

Planning and Lighting:I used Dekogon Clinton Crumpler's Subway Train. What I wanted to do is not only relight the scene but also to give the scene a sense of eeriness and a feel of how I was to shoot if I was here in person. So I did exactly that. I generally think about this type of lighting all the time, so once getting the hang of how controls work and applying what I know from photography, it wasn't that hard to work with. I'm super happy that the whole entre train was also separate pieces as well. 
I moved a few things around to create a different feel. You'd be surprised how much you can do when everything is laid out for you.  I then started to delete most of the defaults that came with the pack which were the lights, the fog and the mesh light, with exceptions to keep the emissions, but that also was tweaked slightly.
Only 4 lights were used here and made adjustments to the fog and the mesh lights. In addition to this, I also made adjustments to the camera. Generally, when I shoot in these circumstances I like to use a wide focal length of 20mm. After that was added in, I then did the usual ISO, shutter, and F/Stop settings and started to comp. I've always enjoyed adding punchy blacks to my work to give a sense of unknown, and super glad I did this also to a 3D piece.

Once I was happy with the composition and lighting I started adding the cameras into the sequencer and did my photographer thing.
As you can see there's a big difference in comparison to the original.  

Final Renders:

I had a lot of fun working on this project and what excited me the most was that I was able to go back to my roots as an adventurer but this time, using Unreal Engine.

Sergey Tyapkin:
https://www.artstation.com/tyapkin

Clinton Crumpler:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/X02eY