Been using shapespark for over a year now and am creating some nice spaces, though we’ve recently had some bigger projects come our way so want to learn how to do better! I think the main issue is with my lighting design so hoping someone can help.
Inside/Outside lighting. We’ve had a few spaces now that need an external house view and then the ability to walk inside. The outside is always so bright even with the ‘sun’ set to 1. I get around it by reducing the gamma but then the inside is darker. Am I missing something? It would also be cool to have a ‘dusk’ setting for this but I can’t seem to get it dark enough outside.
General interior lighting. For just a standard room with down lights, I just use area lighting, this receives good and bad results. Is this the correct way or are there better ways? It’s usually fine but sometimes creates funny shadows and wall textures.
For whole houses, there’s parts where I get some serious shadows (attached) any recommendations to fix these? I’ve got the black filter on high to help but still get them.
For the Inside and Outside lighting use Camera volumes that are configured in the Shapespark editor Camera tab. The volumes allow to have different Exposure setting for different regions of the scene, so you can have darker exterior and brighter interior.
Lighting with area lights only is not super common practice in Shapespark scenes, but sounds OK. If you could send links to a scene that has such funny shadows, we should be able to tell more if this is due to the light type, or some other factor.
How hight is the Flood dark limit setting in the scene with black splotches behind the sofa? You can try different values without baking the scene again, just use the Post process buton instead of the Bake button. This post could be also useful: Blotches and Burn Outs - #2 by wojtek
It’s still a work in progress so a few issues here and there but you can see the strange lighting behind the sofa. What is standard lighting practice? Spotlights for each individual downlight?
The Flood Dark Limit was set as high as it can go, but I can have a little play with this. I think maybe changing my area lighting might be the trick here if you can recommend the common practice alternative.
The strange lighting is the result of too high flood dark limit. If the filter is set to high it starts to affect normal shadows, not just areas that are dark as a result of too low lightmap resolution. Start with the default Flood dark limit value of 0.02 and increase it only if you see dark pixels leaking from behind the objects.
The darker the scene, the lower the limit needs to be, otherwise it affect the normal shadows.
The lightning will improve if you reduce the windows opacity to some very small value for example 0.01 to allow more outside light to enter the interior. You can increase the opacity back after the baking is finished. Also increasing ‘Sky’ strength will improve the result. Your current low sky strength helps to avoid overexposed exterior, but with camera volumes mentioned earlier you can have stronger sky without overexposed exterior (for example 6).
