Somebody Is Having a Bad Day - Project 4: New Light City

With the demo of Project 4: New Light City behind us, I began experimenting with ray tracing and volumetric lighting for our first game trailer. This is the shot that convinced me P4 needed to be told from a 3rd person POV. (Yes, our developers groaned at the mention of changing POV and (gasp!) ray tracing, but it is the artistic design and audience reaction which matter most to me.)

These screenshots of the opening scene - WIP's all around, btw - were a lot of fun to piece together. I created the assets in Blender, textured everything in Substance Painter, and render in UE4. (There's a cvar for high rez shots, btw!). Volumetric lighting is very interesting to me, but you can go overboard if you're not too careful. For me, those kinds of effects should enhance but not define a scene.