Lighting - Adding Falloff to Directional Lighting or Simulating this Effect

Development Rendering
#1

Hi guys!

I’m making a top down game, and I’m looking to get an effect similar to if I just placed one giant spotlight on the map. That is to say - light in a large area with even light and one direction for shadows with edge falloff to black around the outside.

However, it seems clear that one giant spotlight isn’t the right tool for this job - I can’t put any angle on it without ruining the even light, and something about this type of light just doesn’t look good when enlarged this much.

So what’d I’d really like is to use a Directional Light with some sort of falloff volume or mask… or something.

Trying to get creative, I was even thinking of overlaying some sort of gradient material / texture over the map that bleeds out to the edges, but that seems like probably a bad idea for overdraw.

Any ideas? Thank you!
Jason

#2

Sorry to bump this. Also wondering if anyone has had any luck achieving this effect with “Light Functions”. I played around with them a lot - trying radial gradients into the Emissive and such, but seems like that’s the wrong tree as well.

#3

Both a very large spotlight and a light function on a directional light should work just fine for this, although the spotlight will probably be more efficient. You might to to post some more info and images of what you tried with them and why you don’t like the results to get more useful feedback.