Hello, I am trying to learn more about creating realistic lighting in Unreal 5.3. I looked through different environments and how the light was set up and I have several questions where you guys can maybe help me with:
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(1) What is actually considered UE5 “default lighting”? When you open up a project and create the essential light (Sky Atmosphere, Sky Light, Volumetrics, Directional Light), the directional light has something set around 3,14 lux. In the Electric Dreams Environment they are using 100k lux (which is the physical correct luminance of an area that the sun illuminates in real life). So what´s the best starting point here?
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(2) When it comes to lighting dense foliage (turning affect distance field lighting on) I am fighting constantly against the self shadowing issue of masked materials (to large, completely black shadows; see images). I am trying to compensate that with “Distance Field Resolution Scale” & “Generate Double Sided Distance Field” in the mesh settings. Is there something else/obvious setting/workflow i dont see, that I am missing that gets rid of those “overshadowing” areas?
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(3) I guess Auto Exposure is the way to go when creating lighting for procedural open world games? Also I saw that in 5.3 the setting “Extend default luminance range for auto exposure” is enabled by default. Does that mean that its best to work with physical correct lighting values? In some tests, I had the feeling, that the auto exposure works best when i set my sunlight to 100K lux. When working with values like 10 lux, it was very hard for me to adjust the autoexposure and get a realistic lighting result.
