Question about lighting in "Stylized Rendering" demo.

Hello.

Stylized Rendering demo has some specific lighting that I want to recreate but have trouble doing so.
In the demo areas covered by shadows are still evenly lit and relatively bright.
On the default settings in a new project shadows are much, much darker, sometimes almost completely black.
I want to achieve that cartoon style lighting where shadows can be used to enhance the look of a scene, but even in completely shaded areas (insides of buildings without any light sources) things are clearly visible.
Basically darkest possible situation should not have “zero” light, but a bit more.
I tried duplicating both post process and directional light but I can’t achieve this effect. What causes it?

I managed to achieve something similar by using an ambient cubemap but it acts weird for values lower than default.

From the top of my head Overwatch uses this effect really well (I know it’s not UE4 :P)

Thanks for help.

Edit: When I remove directional lighting (the only source of light that I think is there) the scene is still clearly visible, instead of pitch black. What causes that?

Hi Allshar,

As you already noticed you didn’t see anything that stood out in the Directional Light or the Post Process, but you missed looking at the World Settings > Lightmass settings.

These are level specific settings where you can set various settings for how Lightmass works for your level. Here the Environment color has been shifted to be a lighter color more in line with the stylized nature of the demo. Typically this is left on Black by most default levels. Also, the enviornment intensity has been changed to be 5 vs the default 1, which can cause a lot of the brightness to subside when building without a light in the scene.

When you removed the directional light and still saw that there was lighting being baked that is because the enviornment color had been adjusted to be lighter which will change how lightmass color works for the shadowing. When it’s set to black it’s relying more on light in the scene to generate this type of lighting, where now the environment color adjustment is being tweaked to give it a much lighter color, whether a light is present or not. With a light it’ll be brighter, but without it’ll be darker, but still have a lighter tone.

These are two really helpful documents to help you understand more about lightmass: