How do I turn off the default lighting in the environment map?

What do you mean by environment map?

I want to do dark lighting in my environment map. However the environment map is brightly lit. And whenever I add a light it barely even shows up.

create a new level, and choose the dark one, or just build your project. if there were some lights, and it exists even after deleting, rendering the lights maybe helps you.

Hi hs1,

With the default map with the table and chairs or just the template floor make sure that you rebuild lighting once you get everything setup the way you like. By default any light you place in your level with be Stationary and that requires it to be built.

Secondly, you may want to disable Auto-Exposure (Eye Adaptation) as this is on by default and can cause darker lit areas to gradually light up.

You can disable this feature by adding a post process volume to your scene. Set it to Unbound (checkbox). Then locate under the Settings roll-out “Auto Exposure”. Set the Min and Max Brightness options to 1.0.

This will ground out the eye adaptation. You can always adjust this later on to a level you like if you decide you want to have some in your level.

Tim