There is an art-style I require where I need lighting to be an insanely soft overcast of controllable light across the world. This is very easy to achieve with a stationary skylight having it’s intensity being increased, and setting the directional light aside. This has provided the exact lighting conditions I’m looking for. Though it causes sky reflections to be extremely bright, brighter than what the scene actually looks like.
Is there a way to just reduce a skylights reflection intensity?
Hey @LethalDumpster! As far as I’m aware the reflections are based on the material the light is hitting. However, I have a few ideas to try:
Have you tried turning up the scattering and turning down the intensity?
Also you may be able to limit reflections with a post-process volume!
Edit: I don’t think you can turn the reflections down with a post-process volume, however you CAN increase ambient light within the volume. Maybe turn the skylight down and use that instead!
In 5.1, I appear to be unable to see a difference changing the stationary skylight’s Volumetric Scattering Intensity. For CPU or GPU lightmaps, its identical from even 0 or forced 100. Tested with skylight brightness 1 and 40. Same lack of difference with Scattering intensity adjustments.
Adjusting post process indirect lighting intensity does appear to work, but it reveals tons of lighting artifacts which I assume lightmass doesn’t expect to be seen as it is truly dark.
As well as causing bright surfaces to emit/reflect an absurd amount of light.
Though something I have tried that works best so far, is to have two different sky models. One that is lit for the player to see which is set to not be visible in reflection captures, and a second which reflection captures do see, which is set to be dim, and scaled larger to be hidden behind the first sky. Causing the skylight to create better reflections using the second sky. Fairly absurd workaround, but it works.
There are some limitations to doing this. A skylight intensity high around 100 with GPU lightmass causes the lightmaps to be unable to cleanly become dark during adjustment in editor or in runtime, with artifacts of bright spots. Using a value of 40 and ensuring the post process exposure is tuned right, I’m able to have bright days and dark nights. Though there are edge-cases where some surfaces near or on bright materials still have artifacts of bright spots. This does not happen with CPU lightmass, but using that comes with the tradeoff of massive build times for large or detailed worlds, which I plan to have.
Outside locations with reflection probes also fail, as they retain the original brightness of the environment they were built with. Though I’m going to guess this has always been a problem.
Edit: I see that leaving the skylight to build its lighting at a low value such as 1, while using GPU lightmass, then during runtime increase the brightness back to 40, will result in nearly the same effect as building at 40. Except for darnkness artifacts in expectedly low-light areas. That is to say, areas with indirect lighting from the skylight experiencing the intensity go from 1 to 40, look splotchy and darker than desired. Having the skylight start off at an intensity of 2 immediately begins to show light spot artifacts as 40 does when turned down. Though mitigated and not as pronounced. Increasing GPU lightmass Stationary Light Shadow samples just might improve the darkness artifacts when going from 1 to 40 though.
Known issue, will be fixed in 5.1.1 afaik