Unreal Engine Game Lighting Course - PBR - Partially updated to UE 5.4

£199 or 3 monthly payments of £69

Unreal Engine Game Lighting Course - PBR - Partially updated to UE 5.4

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Course
134 Lessons

In this self-paced video course you will learn how to master exposure, ev100, curves and multiple day of times. While doing that you learn what materials are poor and how to fix it. And you learn multiple approach, techniques and principles to go off the beaten path. You also improve your art fundamentals and learn how light and colour function and how it related to our lighting. Lastly, you learn about optimization.

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Learning Fundamental Lighting

To ensure you have the vocabulary and basic training for your eyes we show you what is needed to improve your lighting through a fundamental understanding of light in real life.
(All the video structure is at the bottom of the page. We do not point out everything on this list, it is just key things.)

Understanding Incorrect Materials

Even though you are an experienced 3D Artist we as professional lighting artists must be able to communicate why the lighting is working incorrectly. Often, it starts with troubleshooting materials.

Correcting incorrect materials

Once we show you how to spot incorrect materials and why it is incorrect. We will correct it in Photoshop/Gimp. And you will see the difference it makes before we even correct the lighting.

Setting up correct Exposure and EV

We explain Exposure, EV, and Curves throughout the course in different ways to ensure you get comfortable with the fundamentals of it. Although, we also showcase how to go away from it if needed. Furthermore, we show different times of day and ensure you understand many complicated things that happen contextually.

Working on Volumetrics and Light Bleeding

Working on settings that aid the quality of volumetric and methods that could reduce light bleeding.

Adjusting Post Processing

Sometimes you need to go into Post Processing to tweak the color grading and effects. You learn how to do it without ruining your image while getting some introduction to the various options.

Understanding Emissive and Extra Lighting

Some people get the emissive wrong but having gone through PBL workflow so far you will adjust it accordingly. You will also learn where to put extra light after the main lighting is done. Most people add tons when it is not needed.

Understanding Different EV for Time of Days.

As you progress through the course you will learn different methods, techniques, and workflow dealing with PBL Exposure and EV-based lighting. You will learn copying things does not work. Half of the course iterates on different approaches using different times of the day.

Doing Artistic Lighting and changing Curves

Watch and learn how to use correct exposure and then move over to artistic lighting that looks better while staying true to the fundamentals of lighting. When to adjust curves. This ensures you can adjust quickly if Art Directors needs changes.

How analysing Lighting in Painting improves our art

We go through some classical paintings to further train your eyes throughout the curse to ensure you become independent in spotting issues with your lighting.

How Painting relates to Artistic Eye and Lighting

Throughout the course, there are mini reminders about art fundamentals but also how to train your eyes to be better at lighting. How to see the value and understand color.

Teaching Candle Principle

Learning this is hard for most so we ensure to explain many techniques and principles to cover most learning methods. That is why we do not use the same approach at different time of day.

Why Purkinje Effect matters

We explain about Purkinje Effect and how it relates to our eyes thus why cinema uses blue lighting a lot besides the other reasons.

Game Optimization Techniques

We explain the importance of game optimization and some easy fundamental methods to make your environment more playable by checking your work for issues.

The Danger of Fog

People use fog a lot. Sometimes too much. We explain how to subtly use it and why it can ruin your image if you overextend it. Furthermore, we explain how it affects light and color so you can better guide the whole team.

And lots lots lots more

By taking this tutorial either using Unreal 4 or 5 you will be able to grow to another level with lighting. And if you want to dig deep, fast track, and become better by having us critique your work then upgrade to mentorship today.

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Testimonials

Students who upgrade into mentorship and feedback to support themselves during the course benefits the most. These are from selected students who chose to upgrade. When you purchase the course you will be asked to upgrade if you want to.

Fateh Shehryar

This program is different in the way that they invest not just in your art but in you too; they’ll put you in situations where you might not be that comfortable (but in a good way) so you don’t just grow as an artist but also as an individual.

Edwin Vargas Cortés

Amit’s approach has the right balance of teory, aesthetics and technical aspects in order to learn what it takes to be a lighter for the games industry.

David Del Viejo

I never thought I would be so supported during a course since normally in other courses you see your classes and that’s all, here you have sessions with video game professionals and conversations with other types of people from the world of lighting

Your Mentor - Amit Patpatia

Senior Lighting Artist

Amit has already taught over 2000 students world wide in various topics such as lighting. He has worked for outsourcing companies such as Iron Belly Studios as Technical Lighting Artist. Junior Lighting Artist for start up companies such as Bluebox. Lighting Artist at Ubisoft for Tom Clancy – Ghost Recon Breakpoint and currently is Senior Lighting Artist at Interior Nights. His speciality lies in Cinematic and Game Lighting while keeping things optimized.

Artstation

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Co-Author - Sander Vander Meiren

This course and content has also been verified and co-authored further by Sander Vander Meiren who has worked on titles such as Forza and Hogwart Legacy to name a few. Sander is highly passionate about PBR Realistic Lighting and was an important addition to the team to ensure the quality and content of this course was up to date and accurate.

Portfolio

Videos about the course, communication and feedback.

If you paid for mentorship review and critique during the course the videos that explains the process goes here. If you are not there are other videos explaining other things.

Introduce yourself

Intro to internal Chat (Especially get a hold of me)

Essential Beginner Theory of Art and Lighting

In this section you have enough content to introduce you to essential theory to master lighting in any context.

1. What is light?

2. What is refraction?

3. What is Reflection?

4. What is Indirect Light?

5. What is soft light?

6. What is hard light?

7. What is shadow?

8. What is Inverse Square Law?

9. What is three point lighting?

10. What is the Color Origin?

11. What is Color Temperature?

12. What is Subtractive and Additive Color?

13. What is RGB?

14. What is HSV?

15. What is Color and Tone?

16. History about Red Color

17. History of Orange Color

18. History of Yellow Color

19. History of Color Green

20. History of Blue Color

21. History of Violet Color

22. What are Color Schemes?

23. What are light values?

24. What type of contrast exist?

Exercise 1

Preparing project settings Part 1 - UE5.4.4 Updated for 2025

In this section we go through some new issues with the updated asset environment after it was updated for Unreal Engine 5 and Lumens, so these videos are meant to make you aware on what you need to do for a better quality and less baking issues.

Video Quality Note

Downloading Epic Games Launcher and Unreal Engine 5.4.4

Downloading Polar Facility Project Fab/Library/Download here - UE 5.4.4

[DOWNLOAD] Polar Facility Project File - UE 5.4.4 (If you don't have it in your library or fab)

Opening Map/Quick Navigation Intro & Free UE5 course - UE 5.4.4

FREE Intro to UE5.4.4 course (In case you need to learn it first)

Setting up Project Settings - UE5.4.4

Light Maps & Nanite - UE5.4.4

Lightmap Color - UE5.4.4

SkySpheres - UE5.4.4

Postprocess - UE5.4.4

Reflection Captures - UE5.4.4

Importance Volume - UE5.4.4

Getting lightmaps - UE5.4.4

Lightmap Overrides - Part 1 - UE5.4.4

Lightmap Overrides - Part 2 - UE5.4.4

Fixing Scene Materials and Asset to improve lighting - UE 5.4.4 - Part 2

In this section we dig a bit deeper to fix or change some of the materials and assets so you understand what you can do to further improve, adjust or otherwise need to deal with as lighting artist in the game industry.

35 - Part 1 - Exporting to DCC - UE5

Part 2 - DCC UV Updates - UE5.4.4

Part 3 - DCC UV Updates B - UE5.4.4

PBR - Part 1 - Breakdown - UE5.4.4

PBR - Part 2 - Texture Export A - UE5.4.4

PBR - Part 3 - Texture Export B - UE5.4.4

PBR - Part 4 - Albedo Edit - UE5.4.4

PBR - Part 5 - Normal Edit Shader Change - UE5.4.4

PBR - Part 6 - Roughness Export - UE5.4.4

PBR - Part 7 - Roughness Correction - UE5.4.4

Polar Facility (Day Time Lighting)

Before you can start learning technical lighting it is important that your fundamentals are refreshed and the same as this course. To fully empower you and reach your potential it is essential that you know why your light is incorrect or poor. Knowing what to slide or number to put in does not help if your eye is not fully trained or your awareness of what needs to be done is non-existent. However, this tutorial should also give insight towards Technical Lighting Artist since there is a bit of blueprint going on, customization and such besides lighting.

Exercise 2

Part 5 - Basic Intro on Unreal Lighting Interface (If you are new to Unreal)

Part 7 - Understanding Material Views for Troubleshooting

Preview

Part 8 - Figuring out the Scene Material Setup

Part 9 - Creating fresh material and emissive

Part 10 - Exporting Texture to Correct

Part 11 - Editing Correct Roughness/Metal in Photoshop

Part 12 - Editing Scratch Details in Photoshop

Part 12b -Turning of sRGB for metallic specular materials

Part 13 - Adding new textures into material

Part 14 - Adding Grunge Texture from Quixel Bridge

Part 15 - Fix the rest of the materials

Part 16 - Assigning Material to other meshes

Part 17 - Tweaking the Arc Mesh Material

Part 18 - Notice Poor Texture Details

Part 19 - Removing Unwanted Light Fixtures

Part 20 - Reducing Lighting Chaos

Part 21 - Cleaning out unwanted VFX

Part 22 - Adding Reflection Capture

Part 23 - Reorganizing and More Cleanup

Part 24 - Setting up Daylight and Basic Exposure

Part 25 - Understanding Exposure and Lux

Part 26 - Finalizing Exposure using Curves and Improving Reflection

Part 27 - Volumetric Lightmaps and Light Bleeding

Part 28 - Post Process and Color Grading

Part 29 - Adding Lights around Emissive Sources

Part 30 - Final Render Settings and Adding Iggy Character

Part 31 - Light Clean Up Check and Renaming

Part 32 - Additional final lighting for details

Edited Source Files for "Setting up Static Lighting UE5"

In this section you will find some files to allow you to troubleshoot your work or speed up your work, in case you don't want to learn the important skills of editing, changing or updating source files to improve your lighting.

Read me before downloading materials

M_Floor_Yellow_LightON_Inst.uasset

SM_Floor_01_1.uasset

SM_Floor_01_1.FBX

T_Walls_NRM.uasset

T_Wall_CLR.uasset

T_Wall_SPEC_UP.uasset

T_Wall_SPEC_UP.psd

Understanding Specific Art Fundamentals Part 1

I want to iterate on some art fundamentals based on our earlier introduction. The purpose is to remind you in a different way to ensure you remember, understand and implement previous theory into practice. We also start going into more examples to ensure you understand how to train your eye, analyse and improve your lighting by studying past. These videos although short and concise should be enough to steer you at the right direction.

Part 32 - Understanding Lighting in Painting

Preview

Part 33 - Understanding Value in Painting

Exercise 3

Polar Facility (Overcast Lighting)

In this section I quickly show you how switch from daylight unreal sky atmosphere lighting over to static hdri overcast lighting.

Part 34 - Quick pointers on sky import and material setup

Part 35 - Organize Old Lighting for Overcast

Part 36 - Streamline Differences

Part 37 - Reminder about EV references for Overcast

Preview

Part 38 - Adjusting EV for Overcast

Part 39 - Adjusting Directional Light for Overcast

Part 40 - Fixing Exp Height Fog for Static Overcast

Part 41 - Artistic Exposure and Local Lighting Adjustments

Part 41B - Mindset of Lighting Real Time Lighting

Exercise 4

Polar Facility (Night Lighting - Using general principles)

Exercise 5

Part 42 - Incorrect PBR Night Lighting Demonstration (Still looks good)

Part 43 - Starting Over Night Lighting Correctly (and Why?)

Preview

Part 44 - Explaining EV using Candle Principle

Part 45 - The Purkinje Effect Principle

Part 46 - Setup and importance of White Balance Principle

Part 47 - Finding Lux/Lumens and inputting base values to start with

Part 48 - Adjusting Interior Lighting accordingly...

Part 49 - Exposure Curve Adjustments

Part 50 - Night Lighting Adjustments

Part 51 - Quick Update to Glass Tank Material

Preview

Part 52 - How update lighting differently

Polar Facility - (Sunset Lighting )

In this section we go through quickly how to do sunset lighting using atmosphere method and how to transfer it over to skybox method. Further more, it is meant to make you a bit more comfortable in understanding the principles of EV as a starting point before adjusting it creatively to your needs later.

Exercise 6

Part 52 - Sunset Lighting Sky Atmosphere Version

Part 53 - Sunset Lighting HDRI Sky Version

Part 54 - Water Shader Fix

Part 54 b - The thought process of lighting

Game Optimization

Part 55 - Introduction to Game Optimization

Exercise 7

Understand Specific Art Fundamentals Part 2

Part 56 - Color Temperature Harmony in relation to real time lighting

Exercise 8

Light Functions

Part 57 - Basic Light Function

Unreal 5 - Bonus Sessions

These videos are co-working sessions meant to be free for all sessions meant to enhance your understanding of color, light, value, and artistic approach using lumens. It is unorganized, and messy and goes through the principles you learned above in a different way.

Co Working Session - Creative Lighting in Unreal 5 using Lumens - Sample Video

Common Questions

What part of the material is suppose to be metallic?

Do we turn off sRGB on materials for metallic specular?

Why isn't my white bar in EV Histogram moving like yours?

How to fix bloom convolution being too glow or bright?

How to fix texture streaming pool memory red text issue crashes?

Why aren't my shadow from the cubes showing up?

Why is there stationary or movable light in a baked environment? (Red X's)

Moving wrong lights from wrong lighting scenario level

Videos about the course, communication and feedback.

Essential Beginner Theory of Art and Lighting

Preparing project settings Part 1 - UE5.4.4 *Updated for 2025*

Fixing Scene Materials and Asset to improve lighting - UE 5.4.4 - Part 2

Polar Facility (Day Time Lighting)

Edited Source Files for "Setting up Static Lighting UE5"

Understanding Specific Art Fundamentals Part 1

Polar Facility (Overcast Lighting)

Polar Facility (Night Lighting - Using general principles)

Polar Facility - (Sunset Lighting )

Game Optimization

Understand Specific Art Fundamentals Part 2

Light Functions

Unreal 5 - Bonus Sessions

Common Questions

Preparing project settings Part 1 - UE5.4.4 Updated for 2025