Skylight making materials odd

I have been trying to get light into this interior:

It is too dark inside with just a directional light, so I tried to add a skylight and it looks like this:

You can see its making my materials strange. My character even goes metallic looking when her top is meant to black with camo shorts (yes, Lara). I haven’t touched the default settings on the skylight, but I did try change the colour and intenity; it didn’t help.

Anyone any ideas?

what platform are you previewing in? SM5 (shader model 5)? And is this windows or osx?

My initial guess is that your auto-iris is blasting out the image because you’ve blocked almost all the light from entering the room. You may want to try turning it off (located in the post process settings), or changing the min/max values. Also - make sure you build your lighting, but I don’t suspect that’s the issue.

SM5 Windows 10.

I can’t find the post process settings. Where is it?

If you created a new blank scene, there won’t be one. you’ll need to add a new one. Make sure that you set it to boundless (checkbox near the bottom of the properties) or else it will only be active when you’re inside of the volume.

I’m so confused. I assume the auto-iris is the auto-focus like when you enter a dark room from a light one.

I went into my characters camera and found some post-process settings, if that’s what you mean but nothing about “Boundless”. I tried changing the min/max to 1, and it stayed a constant focus, but didn’t help. I’d want the auto-focus anyway.

Hello PowerGameStudios,

What Floggins is referring to is the Post Processing Volume. This can be found in the Visual Effects section when viewing the “Place” mode usually located beside your world outliner. Drag and drop this volume into the scene. By default this is set so that all changes to the volume can only be viewed while within the parameters of the volume. Go to the volumes details panel and locate the section called Post Process Volume. At the bottom of that section there is an option to check a box next to Unbound. Click it. This will enable the changes done to the volume to be viewed everywhere in the scene. At the top of the Post Process Volume section is a tab called Settings. Click this. This will drop down all the options and parameters for the volume. Here you can adjust things like Bloom and Auto Exposure that could cause your materials to change in viewport.

Now, what you could try, is to turn off Lower Hemisphere is black in your Sky Light. This can influence the color of your materials.

If your building is not one solid piece of geometry, at least floor and the walls and ceiling, then I highly recommend making them solid. Light bleeding issues can occur when stacking geometry on top of each other. I’m not quite sure why Laura is being influenced so much but you may consider changing your sky light from the default stationary to movable.

After troubleshooting with these suggestions let me know if the problem still persists and I will continue to investigate this issue at that time.

Thank you very much! I added a post process volume and changed it so that it was unbound. This wasn’t the problem though, I turned off cast shadows and set auto-exposure to 1 for min and max.

did that fix the problem?

yes it did :slight_smile:

good stuff! you should mark the solution as answered though.