I have a large room, and I light it up but there are too many lights in the scene for it to run well and look good. I’ve also tried using point lights but I find that they aren’t realistic enough. What I usually use is rect lights for smaller areas, but it is starting to seem harder to do with large rooms. I’m also not going to use directional lights because it is fully indoors.
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Someone help? Maybe a tutorial or something on what to do.
You can use megalights if you want a lot of lights with good performance.
Usually I approach lighting by thinking about a scene logically. Is there any natural light sources? Am I going to light it to look like a movie set or for gameplay readability? What is going to be the primary light source? Is there any ambient light? Am I going to put any fill lights that fill some of the shadows but not really realistic or motivated by anything?
No, there’s going to be no natural lighting, and I can assume that it’s going to look like a movie set. Also, I can’t use megalights because i’ve not updated to 5.5, i’m only on 5.4. would it be worth it to update to version 5.5 anyway?
put a skylıght and turn off cast shadows, adjust intensity till you are satisfied with overall ambient constant light in the room.
The rest lumen bounces, exposure level and your usage of lights. This way would be performant even without megalights. Ofcouse totally depends on what you feel about end results.
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Well something else is exhausting video memory. Big textures?
I’d just start placing spotlights with decent sized outer radius. Maybe rect lights. I also consider what I want to be emphasized, a doorway, etc.
Skylight for base ambient light, if you want that.
I don’t like point lights unless it’s something that should behave like that, like a torch.
ALT+7 can show light overlap. Never really had a performance issue with lights though.
I assume this is the post process setting, which I was going to recommend as well.
You can also give materials a little bit of emission from their color channel, if you want a style that is never 100% dark. Some games like dark souls add a little point light to the character so that you can still see things in the dark if they are right next to you.
Darkness can be just fine. Light isn’t all about “looking great in one shot”, because often it’s either a thing to play with or a thing with purpose. For example, the lighting setup is going to be entirely different (often changes every X seconds as well) to fit the purpose of the movie shot. So knowing your intentions would be useful as well. A game differs from a movie differs from a single photo shot etc. If you add ambient light (sky light, eye adaptation) then that effect is going to be everywhere. For a movie shot you’d probably want some master controls to manage all that.
For a single photo shot (and often movie shot) you can do a lot of trickery like removing walls and roof as well to get what you need. A lot that is inaccurate looks accurate (even more pleasant) to the eye. For example, if you have a scene where you want the viewer to focus on one object or person in that room, you will set up the lighting for just them, instead of focusing on the entire room.
You might also improve your lighting by lighting things from different points at once indirectly, or using HDR lighting for the realism (fake reflections, lighting color, lighting intensity as a sphere around the scene).