Very basic indoor lighting

Development Rendering
1

I’m trying to create a very simple test level that is completely indoors. There are no windows or outdoor areas. How can I add some simple ambient lighting to such a map?

Basically, I’m looking to create something like this:

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To me it doesn’t look like there are point or spotlights in that scene. Just some ambient lighting and occlusion. I’m not entirely sure though. There are no dynamic shadows (or cast shadows at all).

I tried using the Environment Color and Intensity in World Settings, but that only seems to affect the outside of my room. A Skylight with Cast Shadows turned off works better, but doesn’t uniformly light the room as in the screenshot above, my ceilings are almost completely black.

Setting an Ambient Cubemap Texture seems to work best, but it seems strange that I’d have to set a texture, when I just need some ambient light. Is this the way to do it? Should I just set a white texture and use the Tint setting?

2

You could create a point light in the middle with a large radius and length, that would create very soft shadows

3

I guess that would be one possibility. The issue I’m have with point lights is that the lighting will be quite uneven. There will be very bright patches of wall, and more darker areas. Setting the min roughness of the light(s) helps a bit, but the scene is still not as uniformly lit as in the image I posted. I’ll keep experimenting.

4

In that scene it looks like they’re doing something similar, at the very least it’s using the square lights on the ceiling as lights which would give a similar effect. You can do something similar using emissive materials on a plane and enabling emissive lighting in lightmass for that object.