Games Production: Professional Practice (Lighting Rig Finalisation)

This post is for the finalisation of the first professional practice brief.

I originally wanted to make windows for my scene so you could look out into space which would help cement the sci-fi theme. Furthermore, I thought it was a bit empty so I added a sun. This was going to be made in 3ds max, but realising I didn't have any more tri count for the scene, I decided to use the default sphere that comes with unreal.

Furthermore, I broke down the environment texel density to include the sun textures - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAtUtTBs using this tutorial, it helped me create the sun in the background.

Furthermore, because we have to author the textures ourselves, I created the textures using substance designer and imported them into unreal.

Sun texture using designer

As to not make the sun look exactly like that in the tutorial, I went with something that was not only grounded, but contrasting. Because my interior is mainly orange, having a blue star like that of Sirius, it would provide some much needed offset and asymmetry. 

To finalise the LCD screen and make it look like an actual screen, I followed this tutorial. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIQrNJUhVjA

Then when applied to a material instance, I could change some of the settings and use the emissive as a mask to only be affected by the effect.

Initial high res screenshot

Render with photoshop post processing.

The original screenshot was quite dark, so in photoshop I boosted the brightness and lowered the contrast slightly, furthermore, I added light bloom around the lights using the vivid light blend mode to give the lighting a halo around it to fake the emissive without it being ruined by Unreal's post process volume.
I additionally added a colour LUT to the post process to enhance colours like previously mentioned, additionally including a selective colour, which helped me identify what colours to boost.

As some additional feedback, I was given advice about the scene, how it looks 'too dark' - furthermore, I was told it looked a bit bare.
So I went back to optimise my environment a bit more, by doing so, I was able to add a cylindrical mesh which would act like cable.
To keep within the tri count, I invested my time into looking at making a spline mesh to help with instancing within engine. This gave me the ability to create a cable within engine without affecting my tri count by individually modelling the entire cable in 3ds max.

Additional cables added via spline mesh

Spline mesh Blueprint construction script taken from this video by Ryan Laley - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKIiWa19EMI

Working on feedback, I additionally added an extra prop, it was difficult to get around a UV problem. When I tried to re-import the mesh into substance painter, which included the new prop, I wasn't able to because of it being located on a drive that my PC didn't recognise. So as a work around, I textured the prop in a separate substance file, exported the textures, then I exported a 'render UVW template' from 3ds max, of which, I put in Photoshop and erased around the props to add the new prop to the sheet. 

Prop idea reference

Adding the new prop to the scene