Hey, new to unreal engine and messing around with things, seem to be going OK untill I added a directional light, shadows are pitch black no matter what my indirect and intensity settings are, also the camera starts dark and fades to normal, is there a way I set the initial exposure to be higher? or just increase the light intensity?
my idea is to make everything white bright then fade to normal as if you have just woken up for the first time since god knows when out in the middle of a field but I like to understand exactly what is happening with each setting.
You can either use a Skylight which adds light into the scene from no specific direction, that would raise the values in your shadows up but also lit areas, Another option is to use RealtimeGI which will generally lighten the scene, I think it is possible to adjust the intensity of the shadows in either the light or post process actors if you dont want them too dark.
Directional lights and skylights works out of the box as real world lighting models and how things like shadows behave requires value adjustments in areas that seem at first glance has no relationship to the desire to control shadow density. In this example you can force the desired result by increasing the indirect lighting intensity to bled off the shadows.
Another option if you are looking to create a solid lighting base is via the use of HDR cube maps added to a post process volume.
Point lights can also be used as kickers for force the result.
