Darken an area without using Post Process?

Development Rendering
1

I’m wondering if it’s possible to darken an area of a level without using a post process volume? I want a room to be dark when you’re looking into it, before you actually enter the area and I can’t seem to get it dark enough since my level has a skylight actor that’s adding ambient light to every room.

One thought was to use a post process volume to adjust the gamma but that won’t work because the room won’t be darker until you enter the volume and once you do, the outside of the room will also be darker which I don’t want.

Is there any method for darkening a room without using Post Process? Shadow volumes or negative lights don’t seem to exist for UE4.

2

you can use post process materials with an inverted box mask to have localized effects from >outside< the volume. create a fog material and make it dark, then lerp it with scene colour with a boxmask on the alpha, put the volume inside along with a box trigger. when the played overlaps the box trigger, fade out the post material. win.

3

that’s a big part of what we’re discussing here :slight_smile:

as for currently working implementations, you’re gonna have to use tricks as ixicalibur suggests

4

Thanks ixicalibur I’ll look into it. Sounds like a fairly decent way to get what I’m hoping for.
Chosker. That looks really cool. I’ll post over on your thread.

5

:)Looking forward to discuss

6

You could use a low tech solution like a mesh blocking the room’s doors/windows with an unlit material with blend mode set to “multiply”, then use the distance to the camera to make it darker/lighter.

7

Would mesh blocking actually stop the ambient light from a skylight? I thought that the skylight was omnipresent like a dominant directional light so I wasn’t sure if you could block it.

8

He’s just suggesting you to put a “dark mesh” on top of everything in your area, and fade it out based on camera distance

​​​​​​If you do that you still get the skylight back when you get close. But then when you detect you are close you could dim the skylight. The point of this trick (or the one suggested by Epic in their livestream lobg ago) is to smoothly fade the skylight out (until its completely off) when you go indoors and fade it back on when you go outdoors. Of course looking out through a window would break the effect, and the transition needs to be slow enough for the player not to notice

At this point if you’re using dynamic lighting there is no other way to solve it though

9

Oh I get it. I thought he was suggesting it would block the light from entering the room during build.