Large Interior Light Settings, Please Help

Development Rendering
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1

How can i illuminate my scene…

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Like This

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2

First of all you should watch/read posts or tutorials about archviz in unreal because you’ll be getting way more information there. Learn from scenes like Koola’s stuff (you can get his Lightroom Interior Scene for free to check his settings). Read Unreals Lighting Basics and use as few lights as possible and set them to static wherever possible (Volumetric Lighting in 4.18 will help).

  1. Change your Lightmass Settings in World Settings. Level Scale to something lower, like 0.3 if you can afford the building times, Indirect Lighting Bounces to 4 or higher (anything above is mostly placebo but you can try higher values), increase Indirect Lighting Quality, smoothness maybe a little lower to 0.7 for sharper shadows, etc. It depends on your preferences and what you can afford perfomance-wise.

  2. Place Light Portals in your windows and scale them to fit the frames

  3. For the white light coming from the outside you can either use a directional light if you like the effect of sunny spots or a skylight/spotlights with inversed square falloff activated and facing away from the windows directed at a white plane (which is used as a reflector to bounce soft light into your windows).

  4. In your Build-Settings, try to build on higher quality than Preview to get better results. Of course this increases the build-time.

  5. Adjust your Lightmaps: seperate your objects so you can change their lightmap-size individually under details to tomething higher, according to their importance or scale (large walls should get 512 or 1024+). Read this and make sure to have enough padding between your shells to avoid light bleeds: Unwrapping UVs for Lightmaps | Unreal Engine Documentation

  6. If you want a quick simple way to have a white exterior, just use your Exponential Height Fog, turn it’s color to white and set the Height Falloff to something like 0.00001. Turn on Volumetric Fog and adjust the exponent and the density accordingly.

  7. Try not to use too many light sources. Use one point light per close set of lights if possbile not one for each candle/light bulb. Try to keep their attenuation radius only as big as necessary.

  8. Use the Exposure on your camera in Details/Lens or with a (global) PostProcessVolume instead of fiddling repeatedly with each light’s brightness.

  9. I’m exited to see your results, keep us updated! :slight_smile:

I hope I could help you!
Carthis

3

Thank you kindly for your detailed answer. Because of my deadline I don’t have much time to solve this map with baked light, I’m trying to go with full movable dynamic light system for now. But after than I’ll work with your directions again I’m really interesting your guideline. Here is my results with movable lights for now if you wish to see

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Thank you again:)

4

Oh, even though baked light doesn’t take a lot of time and will look okay if you just do it roughly, your results are really good considering you used dynamic lights only! But that could be because the assets in your scene are so nice. :wink: So I’ll definitely would like to see the room when you had the time for static lighting!