Victorian Station - Re-light

This is a personal project that I’ve been working on over the past few months during the Lighting Bootcamp at Vertex School.

Through this project, I explored mood, atmosphere, and environmental storytelling through lighting in Unreal Engine 5. I focused on presenting the same environment across different times of day, studying how lighting can completely transform the emotion, color palette, and overall visual rhythm of a scene.

I had the great opportunity to study and translate realistic skylight luminance values at specific times of day to set up exposure settings by applying the Sunny 16 Rule, while creating believable gameplay atmospheres across multiple lighting scenarios.

For lighting, I used Lumen alongside Hardware Ray Tracing to bring realistic global illumination and reflections into the environment.

Since the Victorian Train Station environment was originally built for Unreal Engine 4, I had to revamp several textures, including roughness and metallic passes, while also recreating parts of the material system to enhance the PBR workflow, visual quality, and performance of Lumen in Unreal Engine 5.

This project became a valuable learning experience and a personal study of how lighting can shape both storytelling and immersion in games.

A special thanks to my mentor, Maria Yue, for generously sharing her knowledge, artistic insight, and production experience throughout the bootcamp. Her guidance, feedback, and passion for lighting pushed me to think more deeply about visual storytelling and helped elevate both my technical and artistic lighting skills.
https://www.artstation.com/xiaowantou

Music and Sound Credits: Infinite Ambiance for Victorian Train Station Platform sounds