So I have a dungeon that currently is lit with a bunch of rect lights but this doesn’t seem to be the optimal way to go? Is there a trick to fully light the dungeon with “Fake” Light and then add in Ambience or is there a better light to use to light areas? The issue with rect lights is the odd shadows… meaning you know when you walk under one your shadow angle is always changing. I am assuming the a cube map will prolly play big into it as well. currently it looks like what I have below.
Real time shadows work best with spot lights, so if you can turn each torch into a spot light, that’s optimal. If you can’t, then a point light is second best, but those can be a lot less optimal.
If you don’t need shadows, you could make the lights and the geometry static, or at least immovable, to pre-calculate a bunch of lighting using lightmass. That won’t interact as well with character movement, but in general, you’ll typically just want one or a few lights to have shadows anyway, and all the ambience can just be baked.
A third option is to add a top-down slanted “sun” that doesn’t cast shadows, and a bottoms-up counter-slanted “bounce” that has the color of the shadows, and also doesn’t cast a shadow. Don’t make these very bright, but they do add “ambient” colors to the scene, that vary by surface orientation and normal.
The “correct” way is to make every torch and other light source be a point light that casts shadows (or is ray traced,) and turn on Lumen, and let the graphics card work hard.
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