Question: Shadows are too dark, why?

DrBurke

I have a problem with my level, and it is that the light source casts really hard shadows, so there's two things I don't like: There's no blending between light and shadow, and shadows are really dark, almost pitch black if you look to them from a lightened place. AO in materials seems to be ok, and I have a skylight, but I don't know what to do with it.

I've already searched for help, and all threads say that placing a skylight will fix it, but I can't find any solution, it's still dark no matter what.

Please, can anyone help me with this?

Obscura

You can try incresing the indirect lighting intensity in your directional light to some high number. You can try the same with the skylight. You can also try increasing the amount of bounces under the world settings/lightmass.

DrBurke

Thanks! It looks better now, but it's still quite dark. Any more tips?

Obscura

Number of bounces can be increased to a very high number and it won't really increase the building time. Same with the indirect lighting intensity. So you can try higher numbers.

Would you mind showing your lightmass settings under world settings, the light settings, and a lightmap density pass?

DrBurke

Yeah, sure, this is how it looks right now

Obscura

Try setting the directional light indirect light intensity to like 5. If that still isn't enough, try 10. You can also  bump up the number of indirect light bounces to 10-20 or more without a problem.

I can also see some lightmap seams coming from modularity. Uneven lighting  between the modular pieces.

DrBurke

It really looks great like this! Thank you a lot!
Btw, how could I even the lighting between modular meshes?

Obscura

google - Unreal engine modular meshes lightmap seams.

I think now its really orange and maybe you would want more gi from the skylight and less from the sunlight.

DrBurke

Found something for that!
I just had to decrease the Indirect Lightmass smoothness to something like 0.6
How is it looking like right now? (I kinda prefer a more saturated orange)

Butthair

Hope that helps!