Lighting help! How to create sun light going through a hole for a Cave Scene!

Development Rendering
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Hello all!

Sorta first time user, I have brought objects/materials/textures into unreal and tested out using it but this is my first strong time really getting into Unreal, from start to finish. I am working on a environment scene ( ref pic for example will be attached ) and I’m having some major issue with lighting. I made a default scene from the start ( with the chairs ) and I altered the skybox to a night time, but my real strong question is: for my scene, if I want the main lighting in the scene - which happens to be a darker cave- to be sunlight shinning through a cave entrance or hole in the cave ( from off screen ) how would one go about doing this? Best course of action?
I have been trying to get my head around doing this. Also what’s a good way to make a scene darker too? More objects to block out light ?

The First Image is the main reference of what I am going off of.
( Note: see how the sunlight is slightly coming in and shinning down at the witches house, I wanna up that a little and make that a strong light force but not overbearing )

The other reference after that is sorta what im looking for, just the over all feel, really rays of light ( i have god rays but maybe something better? )

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you all so very much!

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Nvidia’s volumetric lighting, i feel, has more of what people want when they are looking for volumetric light shafts. With the volumetric fog, everything is fogged, and occluded parts are not, while this does give decent shafts everything gets blown out from the fog (to be fair that IS how it works IRL) but sometimes you want “local” shafts IE shafts near a location and nowhere else, those are easy to fake with a material and a simple mesh (there is one in the blueprint example). if you want fully reactive real time shafts flittering through your cave roof, Nvidia has what you need.

Reference pics :slight_smile: first is my forest settings second is a small cave i built just to show you

quick edit to answer a few more of your questions:
the very first thing i do when building a new scene is in the post process volume, setting auto exposure min and max both to 1 will clamp it nicely. then you can play with the exposure bias to darken or lighten the whole scene

​​here is a branch of ue4.18 that has Blast, Flex, Flow, HBAO+, Volumetric Lighting, VXGI
https://github.com/0lento/UnrealEngi…4.18-GameWorks