Rendering and Lighting for Computer Games Animation - Lighting Research

To conduct adequate research into appropriate lighting for my scene I needed to consider how I wanted my scene to be lit, and as such worked to a mental image of what I wanted my scene to look like.

I visualised an empty office, dimly lit, with sunlight beaming through the windows through opened venetian and vertcially hanging blinds. The office would be somewhat empty in furnishings to begin with, and if any dress setting population was needed I would build on top of the general scene.

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To begin I did a little research into 'god rays'. God rays, otherwise known as crepuscular rays are the beams of light which originate from the sun in reality, and in unreal engine 4 by any scene's main dominant directional light which acts as the sun in engine.
When looking toward the directional light, they are seen beaming toward the user, penetrating through any gaps in objects within the scene, mimicking reality.

Below is an example of both a natural god ray, and a god ray in engine.

Upon a little reading, I found that god rays are added to a scene fairly easily for basic usage, or at least utilising them for my scene would be easy, much easier than I had first imagined, by simply ticking the Light Shaft Bloom option within Unreal Engine 4, contained in the details on the directional light actor.

This is a great system, however it is not perfect for my setup, and as such I decided to look into more methods of potential manual creation of god rays for my scene, as the way I would like to have them set up is so that the use does not have to be within the viewing angle determined by the actor itself, and they can be viewed at any angle within the scene. There is more than likely a setting within the engine itself to change the viewing angle, making it possible to be seen at any angle, but for the time being as I had the opportunity to improve my skillset and knowledge slightly in terms of material creation, I decided I would look for more manual methods also.

Upon a short search for YouTube tutorials I found a tutorial located at the following URL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qAXiVJSzxw

I watched and replicated this tutorial making adjustments to my product, and again whilst they are not perfect for my scene, they serve a great purpose in that whilst the god rays from the directional light are not shining directly through the intended blinds, they will give the effect that there is still light shining through the windows of my lawkeeper's office scene.

God rays were a large part of my lighting research, as for almost everything else I could translate knowledge I had gained in previous units, things like flickering lights and general lighting setups, due to the nature of my scene being small and dimly lit, I felt I did not need to research into too much more.