The Lighthouse
The Lighthouse is a captivating project that brings the chilling allure of horror stories to life in a scene created using Unreal Engine. Inspired by the mysterious lighthouses of 1950s New England, this project transports viewers into a nightmarish world.
The lighthouse is a perfect setting for a horror story. It’s isolated, surrounded by water, and has a creepy history. In my scene, I decided to make the lighthouse keeper the antagonist. He has gone mad after staying isolated for a very long time and now uses the lighthouse as a place to murder anyone who comes too close.
To create the scene, I first did a lot of research on lighthouses in the New England area. I looked at pictures and watched documentaries to get a better understanding of the architecture and layout of lighthouses. To get a sense of the mood and atmosphere I looked at the gameplay of horror games made by supermassive games and other studios.
I started this by making the lighthouse bigger than it can actually be in real life, this is something very common that is done in games to make things work, an example can be the Map Presidential Plane in the Game Rainbow Six Siege. To make the map work they build a 747 twice the actual size so that it’s big enough to work with the gameplay of an FPS game.
I spent an entire day just finalizing the structure and building out all the elements required with correct collisions and UV’s. I started replacing all the proxy meshes in Unreal with these refined elements and made sure that the gameplay worked and the player can walk around the scene.
I concentrated all my effort on finishing the base Office level first and if I have time later I can work on the other Floors. To speed up the propping process I downloaded a lot of assets from Quixel Bridge as they are very high quality and come with all the textures. But these were not enough so I made some essential props that were integral to the story and Textured them using Painter, these included props like Log Books, Manuals, Letters, Lights, Switches, and Paintings. I found the base images that can be used as Albedo in Flickr and made the other maps required in Painter, I also added some dirt and grunge and good roughness variations.
I still needed a lot more props from that era and all of those have a lot of intricate details that will take me forever to model, so I decided to source some free models from sketchfab and used those as a base that I can quickly iterate upon by changing their Size, fixing the UV’s and Retexturing if required to fit my scene. All the assets sourced are credited in the references.
The problem with externally sourced assets is that they come with very random maps that don’t always work with the PBR shader as they can be old and follow a Spec gloss workflow. So to make my life easier I Made a Master material with a lot of flexibility that can take multiple types of maps and the properties of which can be adjusted via material instances. This sped up the process and the master material also worked with the Textures exported from Painter so I didn’t have to make another Material for the assets I made. The material included controls to adjust the base color properties, roughness, metallic, normals, and even the tiling, I could also switch between using Packed ORM maps or using Individual maps from each channel.
After placing a good amount of assets in the office I did a very rough pass on lighting, I wanted the scene to be set in the Nighttime during a thunderstorm, to convey a sense of emergency that the player or the protagonist had to take shelter in the Lighthouse until the storm passes.
For this, I Used Ultradynamic sky for unreal as it comes with weather controls and lets me create a Thunderstorm setting in just a few clicks. For the interior, I added Edison bulbs along the stairs and around the room and also lit a few candles around.
For the cables and the chains, I Made a Spline mesh BP that allows me to use multiple types of meshes and place them quickly in the scene. I used it to connect all the lights to the switches and also hand the chandelier using the chain from Bridge.
I used a lot of decals in the scene to keep it light and not have to texture everything as a unique object, this solved a lot of problems with texture repetition and helped the scene come together by blending them with different grudges and leak decals.
Adding a lot of decals around sounds easy but it created a big problem that took me a long time to figure out, the problem was with the decals bleeding onto the surfaces I don’t want them to, and creating weird stretching lines that looks very ugly and have no way to hide it. This happens because decals work like a planner mapping on a surface and it doesn’t use the UV’s of the object to project itself, rather all the calculations are done for it on runtime.
After digging through the forums it was evident that a lot of people face this issue and Unreal still hasn’t implemented a fix nativity, But internet people have some very big brains and they figured out some workarounds, Mad respect for RonanMahonArt for sharing the material functions that can be linked to the opacity channels of the decal master material to controls and FIx the exact issue I was facing, I used this and instantly it made my life a lot easier.
For the “Light” part of the Lighthouse, I made a BP with two spotlights and added the BP to a Cinematic sequence, this allowed me to animate the rotation of the lights. After adding the sequence to the level I realized that the light shafts were not showing up as I hoped. After digging through some parameters and tutorials online the solution was to use exponential Height fog and Volumetric fog for the light shafts to show up, but since I was using Ultra Dynamic sky these parameters were not editable by the user and were controlled by the blueprint.
So I decided to Fake the light shafts by making a Localized volumetric fog Volume material and applying it to a cone that resembles the rough Lightshaft shape and added it to the Light BP this way it rotates with the light. This worked really well and the material gave me full control of fog density, color, and also animating random clouds.
For all the objects with glass in the scene I decided to use the Advance Glass Material pack from Marketplace, this had multiple versions of glass including Clean, Wet in rain, broken, dirty, and even frosted glass. For all the glass facing outside, I used the raindrop glass material this gave a really nice look as the droplets were animated all I had to do was keep the UVs aligned and scaled correctly for the glass. For the glass objects on the inside of the lighthouse, I used a mix of dirty and broken glass materials.
For taking a cinematic sequence I build an environment outside that displays the sense of isolation and dread of the island, I also wanted to show the tension and crisis of the situation because of the weather that forces the player to go into the lighthouse. For this I roughly build a landscape and populated it with megascan rocks and cliffs, I also added ocean water and a pier near the shore and decided not to spend too much time on this as it was all going to be dark.
While taking a sequence I used a tool called Camera Rig Rail for the first time that made the rolling down the stairs shot possible by linking the camera position to the rail and animating it. The rail can be controlled by a spline which makes the process of iteration easier and more interactive.
Assets Used
Final Results!!
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