Should I use spot or point lights to emulate ceiling lightbulbs?

This is a fairly basic question, but I’m trying to build my levels by placing light sources that correspond with the models that you would think cast light, like lightbulbs and track lighting. However, I’m having trouble getting decent results- spotlights cast light in the expected way, but when used on the ceiling they leave the ceiling itself pitch-black, which looks unnatural. Point lights correctly illuminate everything, but to make it look right they often need to be placed halfway between the lightbulb and the floor, which in turn allows the player to walk through its center, and makes it incredibly obvious that the source of the light is divorced from the model that’s supposedly generating it.

So is there a standard solution here that I’m missing?

Couldn’t you use both?
Using the point light to light the ceiling while the spot lights the floor?

Oh, that’s an interesting idea… I’m not sure if it works though, what do you think? It looks better than pitch-black ceiling for sure, but the lights are weirdly intense (on account of the point light behind them), and if I lower the point’s intensity any more the ceiling gets dark enough to make its presence pointless:

What about using a spot light with a very wide angle(attunation?) instead?

Unfortunetly florescent lights are going to need multiple lights to simulate them as there are no light shapes other then round.

You could also try using a emissive material to light up the ceiling, But you have to enable a option in the Lightmass settings for it to compute lighting from emissive materials.
You could then place a plane just below the ceiling and hide it in the game, Or just make the ceiling material emissive(But that would require some tweaking to get it to look right)

HTH

That’s definitely helpful, it gives me a lot of ideas to play with; thank you! :slight_smile: Something else I’ve had good luck with is placing a PP volume around indoor spaces that temporarily increases eye adaptation’s darkness threshold; outdoors it would wash everything out, but when used in a dark space it makes it much easier to make out stuff like ceilings that have limited light reflecting off of them.

In Blender Cycles you can turn any object into a light. An object that actually casts light. (Not just glow).
Wondering if this is possible in U4 … :slight_smile:

That’s an interesting question… I know that from inside UE4 you can wire a value to the emissive node in any material, and bake that material as a static light, but I’m not sure if I’d recommend trying to accomplish that in the graphics software itself; I’ve had some problems importing anything more than the simplest channels into Unreal with the fbx, to the point that I’ve settled on importing objects with a blank material and wiring in all of my textures and cool stuff inside the engine.

It’s better if you use a point light to replicate a regular lightbulb rather than two spot lights. For fluorescent lights you can adjust the radius and the length values to make it a capsule shape(that was a new feature of like version 4.4 or something like that)

And if you really want to, you can apply an emissive material to the bulb mesh and then enable static lighting from emissive on the object that uses that material. The issues with that though, is that it renders more slowly, isn’t as high quality as using a point light, and it’s hard to know what the lighting units are so you have to experiment with the intensity. Also, static lighting doesn’t affect dynamic objects (except for light environments) so you won’t get specular or anything from that.

You’re right, that does look a lot better- thanks for the suggestion :slight_smile:

Try disabling “Inverse Squared Falloff” on the light source, and then lower the intensity accordingly.

This works perfectly for ceiling lights (or any lights) that are too bright near the source