Wow I have a lot to work with today!
OK
I tried already diffuse boost in material but maybe didn’t put a big enough number. Will try again today
I have not tried indirect intensity"
I already have a skylight in my scene which has a scenecubecapture rendered to texture to get more accurate GI color
light is stationary though I should probably change it to static since it’s just going to eventually be a prop scene and doesn’t need any runtime flexibility
I tried last night to put a solid white color on the walls and the river bed to see if that would improve my shadows and it did just a little. With the white material the shadows are not a problem but going back to the dark stone there is only a small improvement in the dark areas. I may increase the value of my wall texture somewhat though I’d like it to match the source as much as possible which is very dark
I have my number of indirect light bounces set to 4 according to documentation the time/return ratio decreases exponentially beyond 4 so I didn’t consider trying it but I will as a last resort
Auto exposure is turned off. Can I set a constant exposure value? I’ll have to look
I don’t have any experience with post-process but will investigate further
The replace lightmass node sounds like a really good way to go in the future w/o altering the appearance of a whole level.
Thank you everyone for the help!
So, since this is just going to be a showcase type scene, what I wound up doing this morning was cranked my skylight intensity up to 50. Combined with my local cubemap as the texture for the skylight this works really well until you build lighting and find that it starts over-contributing to the diffuse term in the fully lit pixels.
Thanks again everyone I learned a lot and am looking forward to experimenting with the suggestions!