Enhancing Outdoor Environments with Future Lighting

Future lighting is one of four Lighting.Technology systems you can use to render the 3D environment within your experience, and it features the most advanced and powerful lighting technology with high fidelity to produce pixel perfect light emission and detailed shadows. To use Future lighting to its full capacity to create realistic lighting behavior, you must prepare the following light sources with the entire environment in mind:

• Global lighting, such as the sun or moon, produces lighting for the entire outdoor environment.
• Local lighting, such as pointlights, spotlights, and surface lights, produces lighting around where you place them within your experience.

Using the Forest Evening Lighting Example .rbxl file as a starting place, this tutorial shows you how to take advantage of Future lighting and transform the first depiction of the evening campfire to the second by configuring the environment's global and local lighting.

Configuring Global Lighting

Global lighting is the luminescence from either the sun or moon in an experience. By adjusting a couple of key default properties in the Lighting service, you can dramatically change how that light appears to users, as well as how it interacts with any other object you place in the experience.

Enabling the Future Lighting System

Studio begins every experience with the Enum.Technology.ShadowMap lighting system, ensuring that the global lighting has precise shadows and illumination. However, to enhance the environment and equip your local light sources to also produce precise shadows and illumination, such as the light from the campfire, you must enable the Enum.Technology.Future lighting system technology directly in Studio. This allows both your global and local lighting to work together and provide more realistic and immersive visuals.

To demonstrate this concept, see the following two images of the same campfire with different lighting system technologies. The local lighting from the campfire with the Enum.Technology.ShadowMap lighting systems doesn't produce shadows in the same way that the global lighting from the sun does, making this area of the environment unevenly lit with unrealistic shadows. By contrast, the local lighting from the campfire with the Enum.Technology.Future lighting system technology interacts with the kindling, rocks, and brush around the environment, producing crisp and realistic shadows for evening time.

To enable the Enum.Technology.Future lighting system:

1. In the Explorer window, select Lighting.

2. In the Properties window, click the Technology dropdown, then select Future.

   

Elevating Metal Reflections

By default, all materials use Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) textures that allow you to display realistic surfaces in various lighting scenarios by using multiple image files on a single object. This means that when you use Studio's built-in materials, the metalness and roughness of a particular surface is already defined for you, and the objects with those materials naturally react more accurately to the lighting in your environment with realistic reflections. You can enhance this effect by setting the Lighting.EnvironmentDiffuseScale and Lighting.EnvironmentSpecularScale properties to 1 to truly take advantage of metal reflections from the Enum.Technology.Future lighting system.

This step is important because it ensures that any PBR textures in your experience, including those from MaterialVariants or SurfaceAppearance objects, look their best and reflect their surroundings better. For example, examine the following two images of the same pan and utensils near the campfire with different Lighting.EnvironmentDiffuseScale and Lighting.EnvironmentSpecularScale property values. When you adjust these values, the metal becomes more apparent and reflects the lighting from both the global and local light sources significantly more than before.

To elevate metal reflections:

1. In the Explorer window, select Lighting.
2. In the Properties window, set EnvironmentalDiffuseScale and EnvironmentSpecularScale to 1. The metal in the experience becomes more reflective.

Changing the Time of Day

Now that your experience is using the Enum.Technology.Future lighting system and materials are reacting realistically to the light sources in your experience, it's time to move the sun to a different position according to where it would be in the real world for the time of day. The sun's default position is high in the sky, emulating around midday in the real world, so it's best to move it nearer to the skyline, right above the mountains. This step also allows the light to move down the path onto the campfire and achieve a nice golden sun.

To change the time of day:

1. In the Explorer window, select Lighting.
2. In the Properties window, set ClockTime to 17. The sun moves to the approximate position it would be in at 5pm.

Adjusting the Color of Ambient Light

There are two Lighting properties that control the color of ambient lighting:

• Lighting.OutdoorAmbient controls ambient lighting where the sky is visible.
• Lighting.Ambient controls ambient lighting within spaces where anything blocks the sky, such as indoor spaces or under tree cover.

By default, these properties are set to produce gray ambient lighting, but to compliment the evening sky, you must adjust these values to add a realistic hue and brightness in darker spaces of the experience for evening time. For example, an evening sky has a lot more purple than gray, so picking a purple hue for ambient lighting creates a realistic environment.

To adjust the color of ambient lighting:

1. In the Explorer window, select Lighting.
2. In the Properties window, set Outdoor Ambient and Ambient to 156, 136, 176. The ambient lighting changes to a light purple hue.

Choosing a Skybox

A skybox is a cube made up of six individual images that create an experience's sky, including what's above and below the horizon. Skyboxes can have a major impact on the look and feel of what's in your environment, so it's important to carefully consider how you can choose a skybox that enhances your experience's visual quality. For example:

• A skybox's lower hemisphere should be similar to the color of your general terrain. This ensures the lower hemisphere closely relates to the ground surface, and that the colors that reflect off of objects will roughly match the skybox.
• A skybox's lower hemisphere should be darker than the upper hemisphere because a darker lower hemisphere replicates the natural occlusion of light from below the ground, making your lighting more immersive.
• A skybox doesn't require clouds, because you can easily add in dynamic clouds to achieve the same effect and supplement your skybox.

To illustrate these concepts, examine the following two images to see how the same chrome sphere reflects two different skyboxes. The first skybox has the same level of brightness for both the upper and lower hemispheres, so it doesn't seem like the sphere is reflecting the world around it well. By contrast, the second skybox has a darker lower hemisphere from its upper hemisphere, achieving a more natural look. For information on how to create and customize skyboxes, see Skyboxes.

Atmospheric Effects

The Lighting service has a child Atmosphere object with properties that allow you to simulate realistic environments by scattering sunlight in unique ways. These properties can be very useful in creating a thickness in the experience's air, giving the environment a tangible sense of depth. The Atmosphere object pulls most of its colors from the skybox directly, which is why the previous decisions about your skybox were so important.

Increasing Air Particle Density

The Atmosphere.Density property controls how many particles exist in the air of your experience. When you increase this property, the additional amount of particles obstruct the player's view of objects in the background. For example, when Atmosphere.Density is 0, the background trees, sun, and skybox are clearly visible, but when you increase this property to 0.391, the particles start to scatter the light and conceal the trees.

To increase density of the air particles in the atmosphere:

1. In the Explorer window, select Atmosphere.

2. In the Properties window, set Density to 0.272.

   

Adding a Haze

The Atmosphere.Haze property controls the overall haziness of the atmosphere to create a visible effect both above the horizon and far into the distance from the camera. When you increase this property, it not only affects the overall environment, but it also affects objects that have a particularly powerful fresnel effect, such as metal objects that reflect the environment around them.

To add haze to the atmosphere:

1. In the Explorer window, select Atmosphere.

2. In the Properties window, set Haze to 1.

   

Adjusting the Color of the Atmosphere

The Atmosphere.Color property sets the hue of the atmosphere for subtle environmental moods and themes, and it can really enhance the haze within your experience. You can set this to any color you want to suit your experience, but it's recommended to set it to a color value that is close to the average of the objects in the environment.

To adjust the color of the atmosphere:

1. In the Explorer window, select Atmosphere.

2. In the Properties window, set Color to 85, 78, 54.

   

Configuring Local Lighting

Local lighting is the luminescence from local light sources in your experience, such as SpotLight, SurfaceLight, and PointLight objects. The key local light source you can create for this experience is the campfire's glow, and by adjusting a couple of its default properties, you can significantly alter how this local lighting interacts with the overall environment and compliment your global lighting configuration.

Adding a PointLight

Unlike SpotLight or SurfaceLight objects that only project light from one direction, PointLight objects allow you to project omnidirectional lighting. This means that when you add a PointLight to your campfire mesh, it projects in all directions outward from its source, similar to a real-life campfire, and it illuminates all surrounding objects in shadows and allows users to see the roughness of their surfaces much clearer.

To add a PointLight to the campfire:

1. In the Explorer window, hover over FireLight and click the ⊕ button. A contextual menu displays.

2. From the menu, select PointLight. The PointLight object displays as a child of the campfire mesh.

   

Increasing the Range of the PointLight

The default properties of the PointLight aren't enough to fully brighten the objects surrounding the campfire, so you need to increase the range that the light can reach. Because the fire is large and bright, the light needs to cast far enough to illuminate the nearby trees, rocks, and brush. This also helps to make the space feel warm and cozy, as though the heat of the fire is naturally expanding outward.

To increase the range of the PointLight:

1. In the Explorer window, select the campfire's PointLight.

2. In the Properties window, set Range to 48. The light's maximum lighting range expands.

   

Enabling Shadows

While the lighting's range is realistic to its size, it's unrealistic that the surrounding trees and rocks don't cast shadows from the campfire's light. Sometimes this is useful if you need to add in a couple of point lights to brighten dark spaces within your experience, but when you're aiming to emulate the real world, you can enable local lighting's ability to cast shadows. It's important to note that additional shadows can impact your experience's performance on low-end devices, so only enable shadows when they significantly add to the scene.

To enable shadows from the campfire's local lighting:

1. In the Explorer window, select the campfire's PointLight.

2. In the Properties window, enable Shadows.

   

Adjusting the Lighting's Brightness and Color

While the local lighting is already looking and feeling closer to realistic behavior, it's still weak in strength and too white for a warm glow. When you increase the campfire's brightness and add a warmer hue, it really brings life to the fire and adds to the coziness of the scene.

To enable shadows from the campfire's local lighting:

1. In the Explorer window, select the campfire's PointLight.

2. In the Properties window, set Brightness to 2 and Color to 255, 179, 73.

   

You now have a campfire scene that is complete and welcoming for players to relax. Using the skills in this tutorial, you can combine the Future lighting system with the PBR materials available to create rich and immersive experiences. It only takes setting up the correct properties and making decisions about these features that suit your environment.