dark shadows How to adjust this? 4.9.2

Hello,

I’m working on this small scene but I think my shadows are to dark. So I would like
to see more detail in those dark areas. So they need to be brighter.

I’m using static lighting (lightmaps) a directional and also a skylight with HDRI and my own
skybox. I’m also using meshdistancefield shadows.

How would you approach this?

I have setup my Lightmass volume and also my own postprocess volume. Do you need
to adjust the exposure in my postprocess or do you need to adjust the lightmass properties?
Or do tweak the ligths further? Or perhaps worldsettings (lightmass). How would I brighten up
those dark shadows. I also tried disable shadows on my skylight. My skylight and Directioanl are
both set to Static btw.

Thanks in advanced.

49d4ee2dabab7f4a195f8966263486562ce89590.jpeg

It’s hard to know for sure without looking at your scene, but my first guess is that your base color is too dark to get a lot of bounce lightning. Remember that for each bounce the light is multiplied by the base color, so if those dark rock have a base color around a 0.1 intensity, each consecutive bounce will be multiplied by 0.1, resulting in far less bounce lighting than even slightly brighter textures.

Regarding post processing: I would recommend tweaking your lighting before applying any significant post processing. (or while having it toggled off) This makes sure that the base lighting works well and gives you a lot of freedom with your post processing. For example in this case you could try to fix the dark shadows in post, but this will result in a flat overall image as all dark shadows get removed. If you first fix your lighting you can preserve deep dark shadows where you want them while getting nice bounce light in the areas you don’t want as dark.

Additionally I would recommend looking at the different viewmodes. The lighting only modes are very useful when trying to understand what’s happening with the light in your scene.

See also world settings > Ligthmass Settings if Environment color is not black and the environment intensity is not set at 0, also check how it will look if “Cast shadows” is off in skylight parameters (sometimes skylight introduces very dark shadows). :slight_smile: