I want to remove pitch-black shadows across the entire scene (it’s a dungeon).
Right now I’m just throwing around static shadowless point lights with big attenuation radius and disabled inverse squared faloff. But that’s not a perfect solution, because I’m getting uneven lighting distribution.
The ideal way would be to have some “flat” light with very low intensity that illuminates the whole scene. But I’m not sure how to do that.
I can’t use skylight because I need it to have light coming through lightmass portals.
Directional light with shadows disabled… Well, it’s directional, so some surfaces are darker than the others. So that’s a no-go as well.
You mean exposure? That’s… not a preferable solution.
I only touch exposure in the very end when I’m doing color correction, color grading, and other finishing touches for the scene.
From my experiments with it, ambient cubemap has its drawbacks. Specifically, it heavily affects reflective surfaces. Mirrors get really screwed especially. And you’ll get weird reflective tints here and there.
It doesn’t make it completely useless, though. In some cases, like a dungeon with stone walls with low light, it can be useful in moderation.
For my recent scene, which is a victorian style study room, adding ambient cubemap made things worse, because of the reasons I listed above. So I ended up just re-working my lighting and creating custom color grading table and adjusting exposure.
