Overview

Phasmophobia is one on of my most recent favorite games to play with my friends, the idea of exploring a haunted building/house, looking for evidence and avoiding death it’s just exiting. But during some matches agains the ghost I couldn’t stop noticing some light glitches that sometimes broke the inmersion of the game (and lighting looks like one of the main aspect of the game), and just before I start to complain about it, I prefer to start an small exercise to see if a can achieve the same results (or better) using the Unreal Engine.

Since I spend more time writing code than build levels/scenes, this was just the perfect oportunity to learn something new.

What does it take to achieve that? (Learning the basis)

My first attemp to light an example scene (I used the Polygon - Town Pack assets for this) and what was supposed to be an easy ride, just placing lights wherever I want, turned to be a little harder than it looked like.

Let’s just say that working with modular builds it’s not the same as one mesh build.

Nothing I cannot resolve looking with google, but with so much actors and properties for the lights in unreal I needed to start study.

Unreal Online Learning courses

The Unreal Online Learning it’s one of the best places I could fine to lear more about some feature of the engine and Lighting Essential Concepts and Effects was just the thing I was looking for. Yes, there are good videos/channels in youtube but most of the time there’s no path to follow or they just asume I already know some information, and the lessons covers the basis to keep looking for more. Also, the epic course comes with a project to follow along and done some experimentation, so, awesome.

The results

After finishing the lighting course I came back to my main scene and try once again. Unfortunatly, even with good results, I learn that Stationary and Static lighting was a no go for my objective of lighting a scene like Phasmophobia (almost pitch black, looking for lights to turn on to avoid going insane). But even with using only dynamic lights I was able to achieve good enough results trying to avoid most of it’s drawbacks (poor performace compared to Static/Stationary). Adding Fog to the scene the cherry on top.

What’s Next?

I’m proud of what I have achieve, I learn more about how to Light scenes with the Unreal Engine, it’s easy as some make it look, but still requieres some basic knowleadge to really start to take advantage of what have to offers.

If the Online Learning Platform it’s not your cup of tea, 2 videos that I can recomend (and channels) about the lighting scenes are these

Have a good day :)