Techniques for real-time lighting indoors in an outdoor level

Enaver

I’ve got a village scene set up with real-time directional light and a real time skylight. I’ve manage to get the look I want outside.

However when it comes to inside a house it is pitch black bar some tiny areas where light comes through some windows. I’ve added some lights in there for candles but they are either perfect intensity and don’t reach far enough or are too intensive but have perfect reach.

Adjusting the skylight intensity was the first thing I tried, however it affects outside too much and makes it look over exposed.

I’ve also messed around with the direction light shadow strength, it works well if I put it to .9, but again it ruins the shadows outside by making them too bright.

I’ve tried added a post processing volume and even with a decent fade it’s too obvious and makes it look like an auto exposure feature.

Lastly I’ve tried turning off shadows on the skylight, but that just makes everything look awful.

I see that fortnite is done completely on real-time lighting yet they have a perfect balance of indoors and out

zachagreg

Your eyes auto expose, how is that any different from walking straight from a dark house to a sunny outside day? Everything blows out and vice versa. But could we see some screens of what your talking about on the inside? From the text all I can gleam is that you're relying too much on what would be considered physically accurate. A light doesn't always need a source so to speak. You can place a light in an area turn  the shadows off to brighten up the surrounding area without affecting your shadows and source object lighting.

jaker3278

I have used a post process volume surrounding my house and altered the indirect lighting contribution and played with the gamma, gain, contrast and saturation. 

What does yours look like? I am using totally dynamic lighting. 

Here's how it looks

zachagreg

So good start on isolating the post process to the interior of the house, it will give you some greater control over the interior and allow you to isolate lighting scenarios.

Totally dynamic lighting is fine and sometimes necessary for large scale areas that cannot be baked obviously so no real issues there. What sort of lighting are you looking for inside the house?

Currently it doesn't look pitch black so that is good. From the lighting on the floor that I can see I am going to assume those are coming from a high angle right? Around the after noon sometime I'm guessing. So you will get the nice vertical light shafts if you allow for volumetric on your directional light and a fog those would increase drama.

Honestly it looks correct for sun positioning and time of day though maybe a bit bright like a couple shades down would increase drama. Something I do with ambient lighting is to set it to what you are comfortable being your darkest shadow. Imagine an empty house with open windows during early afternoon, you won't be getting any long dramatic shadows or obvious directional lighting coming in from any windows other than very high up ones.

As a base I would say this is good. However, it would need to have more added to it. Playing with sun height and light direction will do a lot but I know that is dependent upon your exterior. Best thing to do right now would be to flesh out the other light sources in the room and build your focal points. Less is more in this respect but an empty dwelling with just the sun can only lend so much other than ambient light.

https://youtu.be/h6jPsaYWr1c?t=297

At this time frame watch Atreus enter the home, it is initially pretty dark but there are focal lights in there. 1) His direct line of movement, the candle he picks up and 2) his mother which is his end goal for the cutscene. You can also see how dark it is and very gradually corrects to a decent ambient light. In this scene the roof is still in tact pretty much so it is much darker.

The fades happen and are natural it's just that our eyes do it naturally and fairly quickly so we notice it more when our eyes aren't making the adjustments themselves.