Lighting can make the difference between a "so-so" environment and a "Wow, this is amazing!" environment. Even a VR environment with no textures can look great with quality lighting. In the Introduction to Lighting class, students will learn the basics of lighting a VR scene. We will explore the different kinds of lights in Unreal Engine (UE) and go over the settings that will yield the best results. Students will learn the difference between static and dynamic lighting, and which one is better for VR. Finally, students will learn how to set up a Swarm Farm for distributed processing, which can significantly reduce light bake times. By the end of the class, students will have a VR environment with realistic lighting. They will light their own VR scene using the lighting workflow, a step-by-step guide for creating high-quality realistic lighting.

This is a “no code” course and will focus on making VR applications primarily using the tools that are already included in Unreal Engine (UE). While the functionality of these VR sessions be more limited, this course will minimize the amount of coding required to make VR applications, so students will not need a background in coding to be successful in this course.