Skylight lights interiors completely - except for the ceilings

Development Rendering
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1

Hey guys, I’ve been struggling to get interiors to be lit correctly in my game. It’s an open world game and thus uses mostly the skylight and directional light for lighting.

But I do not understand how to light the interiors properly:

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As you can see, the walls are lit up properly, while the ceiling is pitch black.
But i would like it to be like this:

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Right now the only workaround I have found is to use rect lights to light the ceiling directly:

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But I don’t believe this is the optimal solution. Have any ideas?

Engine: UE 5.4.4
Reference: SurrounDead
No Lumen

2

is it an hdri? is the lower hemisphere not lit in it? in general the skylight has a lower hemisphere color you can adjust. check that.

3

Depending on how the skylight was added, it might have lower hemisphere set to solid color and that color is black.

I find the lower hemisphere color is one of the most important things for lighting when not using lumen, it can really set the mood and fill on dark areas. Usually I’ll pick a neutral color that makes sense for the scene and slowly increase the brightness until I like how it fills in darker areas, but also making sure it’s not too strong in brighter areas. Games like Astroneer update it per biome and it’s pretty easy to notice in that game with the white space suits.

4

I achieved this effect by just plugging the Base Color texture into a multiply and then into the Emissive Color of the Material:

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Now I don’t know if this causes any problems down the line but I think this fixes it pretty well.

Night time and stuff still works so I guess problem solved. I would put a before and after picture but the forum doesn’t let me because I’m a new user :frowning:

5

Increasing the lower hemisphere Color of the Skylight fixes it too, but lights up the whole scene. I guess I’ll just use a little bit of emissive and a little bit of the lower hemisphere-color for optimal lighting up. Thanks for the answers :+1:

6

DFAO (Distance Field AO) can block the skylight leaking into areas that it should be occluded, but it requires games to be designed around it.