Hello!
I am looking for a solution to getting rid of pitch black corners on my scene.
Here’s what I’m talking about: https://i.imgur.com/fmo3FAj.png (some furniture meshes are not textured yet, so ignore the weird looking table )
My scene uses baked indirect lighting to illuminate the room. Light from the window hits this wall, and then bounces, creating nice ambient light: https://i.imgur.com/JlGjeyK.png
One of the solution for illuminating the corners is to increase skylight’s indirect light intensity. However, if I do so, then objects with bright texture (books, papers, etc) bounce too much light on the nearest surface, creating unrealistic effect around themselves.
Placing a light source that don’t cast shadows do not help either - it’s getting reflected from surfaces, especially metals, and you can see that there’s some invisible light source somewhere around.
Tweaking exposure and other post-process effects do not give satisfactory results, because those corners do not have light at all, so they stay black regardless.
I’m looking for an advice. What else could be done to fix this?
My directional light and skylight are both set to 3.
Increasing intensity of the directional light leading to the illuminated spot on the wall becoming white - way too bright. And it also confuses auto exposure into doing weird transitions when looking around the room.
Increasing intensity of skylight illuminates the table too much through the light portal. And it looks weird an unnatural for this angle of the sun.
The thing is, I am happy with the way my lighting looks… Except for those darn black spots. That’s not how light works! I never have pitch black corners in my room (irl) at mornings/evening
I’ll try tweaking skylight intensity a bit more though. See if I can get good results out of it.
Edit: OK, so here’s skylight with intensity 5… Now the table is lit much more, while corners are still too dark
Yeah I’m not sure how else to affect that other than increasing skylight intensity. But as you say it has an undesired effect on the rest of the scene. Have you tried tweaking post processing AO, assuming your’e using it?
Yes, I did. My AO values are pretty low. Because otherwise those corners become so dark, it gives 0 brightness if you check it in photoshop.
The problem is almost complete lack of lighting in those areas. So no amount of tweaking post-processes will help here.
The only way I found so far - volumetric fog. But again, it has to be cranked up so much that the rest of the room becomes like sauna. Lower values help a bit under the table, but the corner is still way too dark: https://i.imgur.com/6aV3YuB.png
Have you increased the Lighting Bounces to a bigger number?
You could also try to increase the Diffuse Boost on Materials that are bright, the Wallpaper for example
But anyway, here’s how I solved this.
I’ve experimented some more with point lights, and found a way to add slight illumination for corners, so that those point lights won’t be noticeable. At least not if you’re not looking for inconsistencies with a microscope. You can see the settings on the second sccreenshot.
In my opinion the textures you’re using for the wood are too dark. Changing that would brighten up the corners quite a bit, and it would just look better in general I think.
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