[UE5] The Building

This project was made as part of a private mentorship with the incredibly talented lighting artist Brandon Tieh, who helped me refine this image throughout the process. I'm deeply grateful for all his guidance and feedback.
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[ Artistic Intent ]
For this lighting study, I wanted to explore large-scale urban lighting by building a full cityscape at night, experimenting with how localized light sources interact across a dense environment to create depth and guide the eye.
My main intention was to convey scale and grandeur, with the central building acting as a monumental beacon through its warm interior light contrasting against the cold, overcast sky. This study was also an opportunity to explore how lighting is designed to showcase architecture. I studied real-world building references to understand how light placement emphasizes structural details and facades, then translated these principles.
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| Artistic Inspirations |
I didn't follow a strict reference board for this one. I let myself improvise and explore as I built the scene, while relying on multiple artistic references mainly to help me find the right composition. My real-world architectural lighting references served as a guide for how to place and shape light, and I had the atmospheres of Arkham City and Dunwall from Dishonored as inspiring starting points for the overall mood and tone.
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[ Technical Setup ]
I used Lumen for this scene. The city environment was built using the Dieselpunk kitbash assets pack from FAB. I used EasyFog to create the atmospheric haze that helps separate the depth layers. The final frames were rendered using Movie Render Queue, then color graded in DaVinci Resolve and polished in Photoshop.

Huge thanks to https://www.artstation.com/brandon_kyt