I am fairly experienced with Unreal but am trying to dial in my skills. I am working towards a realistic approach to my lighting using real world values. I have started taking advantage of the RGB light colors to improve my renders in contrast to the “Temperature” control in unreal (which I have found to be inaccurate).
Both lights in the image are 3000 Kelvin.
However, I have struggled with getting a good exterior lighting setup that also works well in my interiors (I sometimes do full homes and need both to work in the same scene). I have a neutral post process volume with AutoExposureBasic turned off and set to 0 (including min and max EV). If I set my Directional Light to 100,000 Lux (which is real world and looks best, I need to adjust my EVs to 12 even though 0 is neutral. The real problem arises when I attempt to use interior lights (which I won’t use if the space is well lit except for accents and rooms without windows/good lighting such as bathrooms or hallways), where I use real world lumen values (250, 600, 1700 etc) to mimic the type of lighting that will be used in the project after its construction.
Directional Light at 100,000 Lux
With my EV values adjusted, I cannot even see my other lights in the scene at all. I’m at a loss for what to do… as it seems one of the values (interior lights or directional light) will have to be scaled or downscaled. And as far as my EV’s I don’t know what to do as well. I tried a value of 12 for my directional light but it was too dark… its just hard to figure out what to use. And as far as my Skylight goes, I don’t want to use it too much as I want to light the space realistically and in the real world, dark interior spaces wouldn’t be pre lit/softened shadows. However, on the exterior its a great feature so I’m at a loss for which direction to take. Any advice is greatly appreciated! Thanks!