Chernobyl A Lighting Study in Unreal Engine 4. 26

I had a recent chat with one of my good friends and awesome lighting artist Kevin Dalziel about how much we loved the visual treatment of the gut wrenching HBO miniseries, Chernobyl. That sparked some inspiration for a late night lighting study in Unreal Engine, using some of their ray traced functionalities within a fully dynamic lighting pipeline, all while hitting 60 FPS at 4K on my Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti. I used traditional UE4 post processing and tone mapping first. I authored my lighting with physically based values and also altered the default tone mapping settings to produce a linear image as much as possible (My UE4 equivalent of a camera RAW image). And once I got there, I played with the shadows, midtones and highlights within the UE4 post processing settings. And finally topped it off with a custom LUT that I made in PS.