How to give additional light to scene with directional light, sky sphere and sky light?

[Texn0krat]

Hello. I want to add more light to my scene because the part of it is too dark:

I don’t want to use point, rect, and spot light for it because I want to make my light more “natural”. I know that with specified cubemap in sky light I can get something like that, but it’s hard for me to find something suitable, so for now I’m using captured scene:

Can you help me with it?

[Klian]

Hello @Texn0krat, why don’t you just increase the skylight’s intensity scale? It should fill your shadows a little bit more with environmental light.

[Texn0krat]

Hi! Of course I tried it, but it looks awful and even with high values(20) shadows are still too hard:

[Klian]

Ohu gosh, 20 is actually pretty high
Is autoexposure enabled? I personally turn it off when i’m working on lighting.
Also, you could consider reducing the direct light intensity and increase a little bit (like 1.2/1.5) the skylight intensity.

What do you think?

[Texn0krat]

Auto exposure disabled by default, tried to reduce direct lightning and increase skylight’s intensity to 2. Still awful:

[Klian]

It’s not that awful!
Odd thing is, why don’t you have any shadow on the landscape?

[Texn0krat]

Maybe, direct light is too weak to produce shadows.

[Klian]

Mmh, I don’t think so. Which rendering pipeline are you using? Do you have lumen enabled?
Which kind of light is your direct light? Static, stationary or dynamic?

[Texn0krat]

Lumen disabled: without it 100 fps, with it 50-60 fps. Tried to enable it - difference is extremely small.
Stationary lightning - build lightning only didn’t help.

[jwatte]

First, I agree that it’s weird that the ground doesn’t show any shadows. That seem suspicious.

Second, I sometimes fake it with a greenish-yellow light from below/behind the world, that’s a second directional light, that has “cast shadows” turned off. It should be somewhat opposed to the sunlight, but slightly more from the side, and it doesn’t need to be particularly strong. Play around and see if that works for you.
(This doesn’t work indoors, because the “no shadows” will make the light affect ceilings in a weird way)

But, really, Lumen is the way forward, assuming you’re developing for next-gen consoles or PCs.

[Texn0krat]

After experiments with lights I’ve got another problem: that’s original lightning

And lightning after object transition:

And when I’m built lightning I’m getting this message:

What’s happening? Maybe problems because of warnings?

[MostHost_LA]

What’s happening?
Well, you seem to be asking about real time lighting features and yet you are building light on bad assets that have no lightmaps…

Could it be you are a little confused about what is what in engine?
I don’t blame you / not your fault as even the learning section doesnt really have an up-to-day rendering pipeline course explaining things right…

That and, on top of it, the engine is a mess…

Things to try:

1. add a reflection capture too.
   (Should have: sky athmosphere or sky blueprint, skylight, directional light, height fog or some source of fog. Reflection capture(s), correct world settings, correct directional light settings, unbound post-process (and disable eye adaptation for testing values).
2. HDRI lighting maps/tutorials. Its better than the default setup(s).
3. fully dynamic light.
4. light propagation volumes.
5. full raytrace but for stills/render queue only.

[Texn0krat]

Well, I’m using this content from marketplace:

Dreamscape Nature : Meadows - Stylized Open World Environment in Environments...

So, I thought it will be optimized for using. Do you know tutorials about stationary lightning? I can’t afford to use dynamic lightning because it require too many resources and you are right, it’s hard to find tutorial where you can get all information for beginners.

[Texn0krat]

Hm, I found something absolutely strange: when I’m adding reflection capture I’m getting this:

But when I change Source Cubemap Angle to any other value, I’m getting pretty normal result:

[Texn0krat]

The problem is solved. When I look at scene in editor I see this:

But when I’m starting the game, everything looks fine (except fps):

Now, I want to understand - why?