Haunted House Project - Unreal Engine

 Unreal Engine
Early Development

    In my previous blog post, I uploaded a screenshot of my scene so far in Unreal Engine – at the time, I was planning to have my lighting primarily in blue and in yellow because I quite liked the contract because the coldness of the blue and the warmth of the yellow created. However, when I asked one of my tutors for feedback, he suggested me to have a look at this artist called John Atkinson Grimshaw. He has a very interesting way of incorporating lighting in his dark, nightly paintings. I had never actually heard of the artist before, so I was so surprised when I looked him up and saw his work, I found it absolutely beautiful. His landscapes had such an eerie, ghostly vibe to them, which is something that I absolutely love. He had managed to create that mood without even adding a single ghost into any of his paintings. 

    What made the biggest impression on me in regards to his work was indeed his approach to lighting. Instead of using blues to paint the night, he seems to be using a lot of greens which I think is what contributes a lot to the eeriness of his landscapes – it's quite unconventional. It reminds me a lot of author H. P. Lovecraft, who tends to use words to describe similar landscapes in his stories – a lot of greens in nightly settings.

    Below, I'm going to insert some of my most favourite paintings that I recently discovered by artist John Atkinson Grimshaw. 

John Atkinson Grimshaw

    After discovering Grimshaw, I decided to take a completely different approach to the lighting in my own environment in Unreal Engine. What I did was basically turn the blues that I had into greens instead, in a way in which it would suggest that the night outside is cold and green, and quite eerie compared to the atmosphere inside which is warmer, more inhabitable by things that the player may not necessarily be able to see, but would be able to sense – which is where I would like the haunting element in my scene to be coming from.

    How I did that was adding green emissives to my windows to give the impression that the night outside is eerie and it's lighting up my scene in faint green. The other emmisives I added on my candles to suggest more warmth that comes with places that are more inhabitable, like I mentioned above. Here's a very quick breakdown of how I did that.

Emmisives

    Basically, I made my emissives by adding a separate material ball in Unreal Engine. To it, I added a constant and a multiply that I connected to my emissive node. I find this way of making emissives very easy to navigate around because I can increase and decrease the brightness anytime I want by just going back to my material. It's a very non destructive type of workflow, I think.

    On the other hand, I took some time after that to arrange my scene in Unreal Engine because initially, I thought that it looked a little bit too empty. I'm going to insert some screenshots from my Unreal Engine environment progress here.

    What I'm planning to do next is focus on modelling the sofa, which is going to be one of my hero assets – because technically, my environment is inhabited (haunted) by this gigantic creature that I mentioned in my previous blog post, which was very inspired by Lady Dimitrescu from Resident Evil Village. So whilst there is one normal sized couch for the human sized creature, there is also going to be one bigger sized sofa for the non human sized creature too. This was also something suggested to me by one of my tutors in order to give the viewer a better understanding that this environment is indeed inhabited by something that is not entirely human. I really liked that idea and I thought that it has much better visual communication.