Hello everyone!
I hope this thread is not dead 
Sorry if you already answered my questions but I really tried to read all the responses!
So now, are some of you actually working with physical lighting values? Do you still have issues with the exposure and with the material reflections?
I would like to use this physical ‘method’ in the project I am working on. I am working on huge environments (big caves with high ceilings) and I tend to find reaalllly difficult to have indirect lighting from my lights on the players. Right now I am using a 3 lux intensity for my directional light and 1 for the skylight (which captures a skybox whose texture brightness is set to 1).
Even though I can achieve good lighting for my environment (also by adding some fill lights here and there), the volumetric lightmaps are suuuuper dark, so the players are also really dark. They don’t fit with the environment at all, and I don’t want to add more light since I want to keep a mysterious and dark mood.
My first thoughts were that I use really low values for my sky and sun and all the other lights, so they don’t create so much indirect lighting.
I tried using physical lighting values on a test scene: I increased the sun to 100 000 lux, increase my skybox texture to 5000 cd/m2, and changed the exposure mode to ‘manual’ with the proper settings in the camera so that it is not super bright. I baked the light, and looked at my volumetric lightmaps, and theeen it made a lot more sense. They were not black anymore and fitted well in the environment. With the same test scene, I did the lighting using the other method (sun = 3 and sky = 1) and achieved approximatively the same look, but after baking, the volumetric lightmaps were dark.
So I guess using physical lighting values may help! But I don’t wanna f*ck the whole project and the materials and stuff if there are still some issues regarding this way of doing.
Would you advise me to go with that? If no, how do you do to make your players brighter when you don’t wanna make the environment brighter? Maybe I do something wrong in my lighting …
Thank you a lot for your response! I am struggling soo muuuuch with that 