Creating warm lights and cool shadows for an indoor scene; help with making interior lighting

coolguyslims

Hello, I'm creating a scene and I want to get my lighting to look nice before I proceed with the rest, but I can't get it right. I want to have subtle warm lights and some cool shadows. I edited a screenshot of my scene in Photoshop to get the look I want, but I'm unsure how to implement it in real-time.


Photoshop edit of the desired effect. I think it just looks more interesting.


Current look.

Any help would be greatly appreciated   

Brandon.LaFrance

This scene looks great! So one thing about lighting that took me a while to wrap my head around is that the color of shadows is determined by your ambient light. I'm a character artist, so my experience is limited to pretty simple lighting setups for presenting characters, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt.

When lighting, I tend to separate my lights into groups depending on their purpose. For the majority of my use cases, a basic 3-point lighting setup suffices. This probably isn't exactly the approach you'd take when lighting an entire scene/level, but is still probably a useful way to think about lighting in general. Anyhow, a basic setup might look like this:

1. Key lights: These are going to be your main light source, and will be responsible for what is perceived as just "lights". Basically what you have currently.
2. Fill lights: These are essentially your ambient lights, they will determine how your shadow looks. Generally much lower in intensity than your key lights. Your bounced lighting/global illumination also falls into this category. As a result, the color of the objects in the scene will actually have a pretty large impact how your shadows are perceived. In an outdoor scene, the illumination provided by the sky would also fall into this category.

3. Rim lights: These are accessory lights, usually the most intense, placed very specifically to highlight certain aspects of your scene, often to outline a silhouette of something of importance.

While working, it is helpful to disable the group of lights you're not adjusting to be able to see exactly how they affect the scene. For example, if you disable your key lights while working on the fill, you're essentially seeing the entire scene's "shadow", and can make decisions appropriately. Working this way can help you simplify your decision making, and can give you much more control over the process, e.g. the overall contrast of your scene will be determined by the relative difference in intensity between your key and fill lights.

Some great resources on the topic can be found by examining related fields such as photography and cinematography.

Brandon.LaFrance

One additional note that I would add is that in a physically based lighting setup, the overall albedo value of the materials in your scene will determine how much light gets bounced when you bake your lighting. This will directly affect category 2 from my post above. So as it specifically relates to your post, this is perhaps one reason the shadows in your scene are so much brighter than your desired look. It looks like the placeholder material you're using has quite a high albedo, hence more light is reflected, and your shadowed areas are quite bright as a result.

Eric Chadwick

We have some stuff here that might help 
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Lighting

coolguyslims

Cool, thanks for the help everyone 

sprunghunt

I would normally do that by mostly relying on the post process volume settings. You can adjust the shadow color and highlights separately or use a color LUT. You can get it some of the way there with lighting but it's easier to just use the post process volume. (doing it with post FX is how the film industry does it too)