Hey guys,

I am making a sci-fi room where there are tests being done on aliens. I am going for a dark room and trying to get little ambience and surface lighting. I am trying to make the room have a scary feel to it but I need to have a bit more lighting and need advice on how to do it.

Here is a video of the room, hopefully my camera movement in the video isn't to shaky like my last video was.


Please tell me what I can do to make this room look better I am not going for gameplay or anything this is just a test room I am making for fun and want to get it to look the best with a dark scary mood to the room and I am all ears for advice here since I don't know much about level design and lighting.

I was thinking that you might put in the following:

(1) You might put in some more illuminated control panels and some illuminated screens (like those from Mega Pack 3 pictured below) and put them on the square pillars where the green plasma barrels are located, or on the wall behind the alien bodies. It can look like health monitors that monitor the health of the alien bodies.

(2) You might also put in some illuminated keyboards at both curved computer monitors. I saw one, but I wonder if the other should have one also.

(3) You might also put in a small blinking red light on the wall (similar to the ones on the original Star Trek TV show for the red alerts) or small lights on the wall as emergency battery back up lights.

(4) You could also put a small thin red light strip on the side walls behind the alien bodies, or next to or behind the rounded blue and red barrels that are in the metal cages. I thought it might add some mysterious ambiance to the place also.

I wish you all the best...

Len's advice is good. Find or buy any objects or decals with illumination maps and add them to your scene. If you want to make your own objects, make sure you include an illumination map with it to add lights of your own. Hopefully we will be able to add a few dynamic lights in when the DX11 version is out which are (hopefully) less overpowering than the current lights and also have a far higher count than 4. Although we may have to wait for a further update for that, not sure lights are part of the update beyond basic light and ambient shadow work.

Increase your Global Specular slider. I think that might help with the metal materials look more light reflective.