Hey,
So I have been putting an HDR of a field with strong sunlight into a skylight and baking lighting with it.
I get approximate matching colours from the HDR, but it produces no directional shadows from the sun area of the HDR. Is there a way to override a setting on the skylight to produce directional shadows at all?
Somewhere in the forum is a tutorial on using HDRI correctly. Did you try search?
Yeah I have seen a few tutorials. None of them light using the range of the HDR. The Skydome generates a very limited dynamic range and I’m guessing, VERY low res approximation. It doesn’t produce directional shadows at all, even if an HDR is created with just one hotspot on it, in an attempt to reproduce a spotlight effect, it doesn’t shade properly.
Here is a tutorial for using HDRI’s in the skylight. You can see from the results the issue. The sunlight in the HDRI doesn’t contribute at all. Realistically, the result of this tutorial would exactly the same by just using environment colour tinted slightly blue.
I’m convinced now that the skylight alone can’t be used to light a scene in UE4. It has been optimised to add the general colour of the HDR. BTW this probably means that HDR’s can be tiny resolution and still look identical. w
The next step seems to be:
> Put the HDR on a sphere, that emits light into the scene via it’s emission OR
> Light the same HDR with a wide spotlight facing upwards
So far neither of these approaches contributes to lightmass.