Trouble with mesh lighting at night

[AutoLiMax]

Hi, I’ve created a day/night cycle using a timeline but at night all meshes look very bright.

Here are 2 screen shots comparing day and night:

As you can see in the bottom image which is night time everything is way too bright!

This is a grass material:

All my materials are pretty much set like this.

The day night cycle is set up like so:

Because of the day night cycle all the meshes are set to dynamic so no baking is really needed. The trees are just static meshes as well.

What could be the cause of this? I’ve been trying to figure it out for ages!

Thanks!

[joemit]

Is the sunlight coming through the bottom of the landscape mesh?

[Wilkes]

That’s my guess too. To me it looks like bounced lighting that got baked into the lightmaps, but you said that everything’s dynamic so that’s impossible.

[AutoLiMax]

That’s exactly what I thought. So I made a huge box and put it under the island. This hasn’t made a difference.

You can see the cube far extends the bounds of the sky sphere.

Though saying that it does look like every things being lit from the underside even with the cube.
Here is a fern from the top

Here is the same fern from the underneath

What could be causing this?

Thanks!

[Frepp73]

Are you using a skylight? If so, it needs to be updated when the light changes. I usually use a loop that updates it every X seconds. You don’t want to update it every frame since it makes everything laggy.

[AutoLiMax]

I’m not using a sky light. I just have a sky sphere and a directional light. As it gets later through out the day the sky sphere sun brightness goes from 25 to 0 and the directional light intensity goes from 2 to 0. So it should turn pitch black.
This is the level bp with the day night stuff

This is the a section of the time line which controls the brightness and such

Should I be using a sky light?

[AutoLiMax]

I’ve just discovered this. When deleting all of the day night cycle stuff to try again I noticed that even with out any light or sky sphere that my meshes are still lit! :S

[AutoLiMax]

I think that the issue was the lighting that was built before I made everything dynamic. I’ve rebuilt the lighting with no lights and every has gone pitch black. I’m going to recreate the day night cycle and post back with the results!

[AutoLiMax]

Perfect!

[Wilkes]

Glad you figured it out!

[animate1978]

I am having the same issue actually and had to search the forums and found this thread. I too have a simple box under my landscape to attempt to block the light when it goes past the horizon which as mentioned above simply doesn’t work. I have taken out ALL my lights and rebuilt, added a new directional light and still, no go. The issue seems to be present once I leave a certain radius of the player start because once I go in game I can move the camera under the character and all looks good, I run anywhere else for a few seconds and move the camera and the directional light will light everything and oddly it will light everything depending on the angle of the camera. So for example I can move the camera above my character and get pitch black, move it under and everything is lit, move it to the side a bit and the lighting is half way between. I am very confused.