Colour Temperature

I never really understood what I was changing when I tweaked the 'temperature' of a light in a game engine. I assumed it was simply a quick way of making an environment look warm or cold, which it technically does also do. 

It was only yesterday, when I was watching Unreal 4 lighting academy session 2.2 I learned how to effectively use colour temperature in an Unreal 4 environment. The workshop-style tutorial focuses on lighting for Architectural Visualisation, but it's great practise to understand these principles to build up an accurate basis for a game environment.

Colour temperature most easily simplified as a method for describing the colour characteristics of a light. the colour ranges from warm (yellow-ish) to cool (blue) with a pure white colour in-between, usually seen from the light emitted by the sun midday.

The temperate chart annotations give examples of where you would see certain Kelvin values in real-world lighting sources.
It's a rather intricate technique to explain without being more knowledgeable in lighting, so head over to here for a more in-depth description.

Overall it's an excellent tip for improving my lighting knowledge, over the past few months I've realised how important (and difficult) it is to get lighting 'correct', so keep on learning!


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