Lighting for Nightscene

Hey fellow Unrealusers,

I am currently trying to light a night scene in a forrest, there is literally no light source expect the moonlight. Problem is I have no clue about lighting at all. Right now I am using a Directional Light with Intensity set to 2 to fake the moon light and a gigantic point light that covers the forrest area with the color set to a dark blue and the intensity toned down to about 0.5. In the Post-Processing Volume I changed the Auto-Exposure min. Brightness to 0.2. Problem is I can’t seem to find a good balance between looking dark enough to be at night time and not too bright to ruin the mood.

Anyone here willing to share some tipps on how to light at night is welcome :slight_smile:

Once you get to the point where you are just balancing a few things, try playing with the Color Grading Color Grading and Filmic Tonemapper | Unreal Engine Documentation

I read a tip once but I’m not sure that the right thing to do, I use a skylight with “movable” (not static) setting (under transform transform tab). Try to low the intensity and maybe change the color and it may look good.
The bad point is the performance I guess.

In that case I strongly suggest you just google a few tutorials to learn the basics of lighting, THEN if you still have questions make a thread about the specific questions.

I know the concept of main and fill lights etc, just not sure how to apply that to real world scale. Most of the tutorials I found just cover lighting for a small scene like a room.


Quick Update, after playing around with some settings for a couple of hours:

dont use colored light sources - keep them between white and black, do the coloring later on in post
use gamma and gain to fix lighting problems rather then adjusting intensities all over the place

Keep the directional light,
Set both min/max exposure in post process volume to 1, leave bias at 0
Remove the point light,
Add a skylight instead, tweak the intensity.

Could you give me a little bit more insight on the skylight vs the point light ? I did use a skylight in the first place but it didnt seem to change the scene that much so I replaced it later on with the point light. Gonna head to bed for now but will post updates tomorrow.