Is there a way to block skylight inside buildings?

When using skylight and a skydome, even if I turn off indirect lighting in the details, it shines inside caves and buildings like its daytime(there’s no holes in the walls). How can I fix this other than disabling skylight completely?

Without an screenshot, I’d guess what you’re seeing is the specular reflection from the outside. Place some reflection captures inside your interiors and see if it helps.

This, a baked SkyLight only bakes diffuse with occlusion, not specular. Or if you’re using a Movable SkyLight, there is no dynamic occlusion unless you enable DFAO.

I tried turning off specular lights, I put reflection captures in, I rebuilt lighting, nothing works except turning off the skylight. Its shining underground as if it were daylight even though there should be no light in there at all.

Same problem here. Can someone explain very simple how to make skylight not shine through roofs, walls, etc?

You use a blueprint at the entrances to cycle it on/off

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Thank you for that workaround, but I would prefer another alternative if possible.

You can make the offset of the Eye Adaptation less - or use a different curve entirely by using a localized post process.

Or, wrap the area up in a box so that light cannot be inside.

That’s about it.

In high quality projects you use an entrance portal that lowers the intensity, adjusts or removes fog (because fog in interiors), and does a number of other things to improve the transition.

Thank you I appreciate the information. :smiley:

That sounds like a small entrance like a door, best with a door your can make open and close for have good transition.

I have a third-person game and buildings with bigger entrance, like big garage (or hangar, or other buildings with very big entrance, or big cave entrance). It’s open, you can look inside through the big entrance and you can look far inside.
I do not see a solution here with any kind of “transition”. How should I do the transition when the problem is that you see the skylight in the buildings already when you are 20 meters away from the garage and look inside, which already is the problem. Of course I could shut down skylight when “going” inside. But there is no really “going” inside transition". Yes there is, but the transition is not on point, the transition is a long way and having mind, the TPS character can turn around and should not see how “streets” get darker when go into the building.

Of course I love simple solution and often game development is trying to make things simple, but in this case I think is is not working. Or I miss a point in the solution. Or I am simply dumb as hell. :slight_smile:

I heard / read about solutions using a transparent darker wall (I think you mean that with “entrance portal”), like dark glass, which makes the look inside darker. But I struggle to think about this solution in my third-person example with big entrance where you can look far inside (and also look far from inside to outside when turn around on way inside). When do I should use the transition and remove the “dark glass walls” and switch off skylight and having it smooth (when player turned arround)?

If someone knows a tutorials or UE4 inside stream or somethings else where this topic is explained, would be cool to have a link.

A line trace can probably do the trick.
all you have to do is put something like an arrow component inside the portal BP, and compare (dot) the forward vector of character and arrow.

That tells you which direction you are entering or looking.
based on that you can make localized adjustments.

a darker transparency at the entrance will look bad. Shadow needs to cast and the translucency would change its color at the entrance.
the better solution would be a custom stencil value for the walls and a PP material to darken the color bcold on the focal point (direction you look) from the BP of the entry way.

Darkening is possible with scene texture post-process0 channel, just multiply by a shade of dark gray.

Other than that, different skylight settings may be better. Balance the scene where it looks good at 10am, 12pm, 4pm, 8pm and 12am - equatorial on equinox style (directional light 0,270,0).
If you manage it which takes some time you’ll have a better base to decide if you need to additionally correct the meshes via post process or come up with something else.

Thank you MostHostLA. This is really a comprehensive change to have the goal of no skylight inside, but it’s a really cool idea and advise! Thanks a lot! Good ideas.

Just a question: Is there any “volume” in UE4 which affects light for the meshes inside the volume, without having it related to player position? Of course I know Post Proc Volume, but they are player position based. Perhaps Lightmass Importance Volume or any other volume, which can also affect how the meshes inside the volume react to the amount of light they get.

Not that I’m aware of. Volumes work off player location or camera location inside the volume…

and for the most part they aren’t localized like setting a mesh to a specific stencil number would be.

Another possible localization would be to determine and darken a material based on the dot - pass an MPC value that darkens it when looking through the portal.
I think it would be more expensive than the same in a post process though. But you can get different effects by using an AO mask to get a shade (darker at the top) sort of effect.

Might be worth taking a look at Chosker’s implementation repurposing reflection captures for localized IBL: https://forums.unrealengine.com/deve…implementation

Never tried it, but it always looked really nice.

nice one indeed - if you can afford to be on a custom engine version or similar.

Just curious because I have never tried this. But does LPV support fully black as the injection color?

If it does, then a variable localized solution for things like the atrium would be a black lpv texture with the normals pointed towards the ceiling (invisible from below) that offsets the ceiling to black colors gradually based on the LPV values set up in both post process and directional light.
the benefit vs any of the things I already mentioned would be that it is a more dynamic approach.
I doubt Black is a viable color to inject into the light being black is the absence of light - but its a nice theory :stuck_out_tongue:

… I wonder if the new GI in ue4 will finally address all of this.
.26 has already changed the way LPV works making emissive directly affect the ambient without the need for LPV setup.

This looks really cool.
I read so many answerhub threads and forum posts about that topic, I never saw a link to it before.
Thanks for the advise.

looks cool but it’s a UE4 fork, declined by EPIC

I just cannot believe they dont have such a feature.darn