So the lighting is very warm then and close to the horizon, which is warned against for lighting and shadowing since it can lead to very long traces.
No, the rays start out with an energy and color, hit a surface and based on that surface, an amount of that energy is removed, some amount of the ray’s color is imparted onto the surface and some of the sufrace’s color get’s picked up by the ray that then goes on to hit other surfaces, rinse and repeat until the ray is either out of energy or reaches some maximum trace distance.
I mocked up a default level with the same adjustments to the sun angle and roughly the same scene composition. Here are the results:
Oh and my Lumen scene views are always broken with a bunch of black static TV horizontal noise stripes everywhere, don’t know why, but maybe I need to repair the engine or something. Might also be be an AMD GPU or driver issue though.
Also, nothing is non-uniformly scaled either. A segment of wall was made with the cubegrid tool and then duplicated for the other side and the top. The cube on the left is just a cube uniformly scaled up to plug light from coming in the back. Obviously, there is some light leaking since the walls and ceiling share the same edge there, but I left it there to try to introduce artifacts and noise.