Why are shadows in unreal engine so dark?

[Goldenvale]

Thanks for the replies.

@;478322

With dynamic lighting you don’t really have dynamic G.I so you have to rely on balancing the skylight and the rest of your lights to make them appear less dark. If you use static lighting you should be able to get nice soft shadows very easily.

I’ve tried this but it produces the exact same result just baked. Any specific way to approach this method?

@BoredEngineer;478323

A bit more skylight intensity and a bit less sun intensity. Another thing to play with is tone mapping post processing.

I’ve played with the skylight and sunlight intensity for ages, I can’t get the shadows to be lighter without making everything else too bright. I also tried tweaking everything in post processing, but I don’t see a tonemapper in the list. Do you mean color grading?

@Jenny Gore;478327

Have you any other source of indirect light than Skylight? Witness use custom light baker so it’s get nice soft and clean GI. In physical based rendering shadows are just absence of light. There is no opacity control because it would make shadows totally unphysical. You could try to tune Skylight bit more carefully. Calculating static lightmaps with 100 bounces will help too. Exposure and tonemapping settings might help as well. Heck you could even bump up the indirectional light intensity. There is ton of options.
Edit: You could try ambient cubemap too.

No, i’m only using a skylight. I’ve tried using a second directional light at a 90 degree angle which makes the shadows look lighter but adds a noticeable highlight to every object with an angle in the shadows. I find it strange that Unity 5 has a slider for shadow strength, even though they have physically based materials. I’ve tried tuning the skylight but like I told BoredEngineer, I can’t make the shadows lighter without making everything else too bright. Increasing indirect light intensity doesn’t help much, it just makes the GI more noticeable.