I tried to create a scene with an outdoor environment and a room with windows in it such that the outdoor environment is visible through the windows. The outdoor environment contains a HDRI Sky and automatic exposure override to the global volume. I used a local volume for the room to provide a correct brightness for the room. I tried to fulfill this task by adding an HDRI Sky and modified the exposure of the sky for the interior of the room to reduce the brightness of the room. This works well to provide the correct brightness inside and outside of the room. Unfortunately, the sky that is visible through the windows of the room is very dark with this approach. Is there another possibility to solve the large brightness difference between the outside environment and the interior of the room? I cannot use lightprobes/lightmaps because my environment/room geometry must be dynamic and the brightness of the sky should change dynamically.
Hey, if you cannot bake anything at all and have troubles with exposure management, I would then suggest you keep the sunlight intensity extremely low (slightly above 0). This will reduce the need to have a very bright sky.
Of course, this will be a very old school way to handle lighting and not physically based at all, but it will massively reduce the lighting range of the scene and it will not need constant exposure micromanagement. The photorealism might take a hit, but this can be artistically mitigated.
Additionally, you can look into the “Indirect lighting controller” (add it to your local volume), this can be used to kill the ambient lighting seen by the camera.
Hi, thank you for your reply. Your suggestion to use the “Indirect lighting controller” helped me a lot to create the required lighting setup. Bright outdoor environments look very plausible now. Also, very bright sunlight > 100000 lux works well with this solution. There is only one remaining issue. In my case, the interior has always the same brightness. If the outside environment is very dark (night), I need to provide a value > 1 for the multipliers of the “Indirect lighting controller” such that the geometry of the interior is visible at all. The sky is dark as expected. However, the geometry that is placed outside of the room and is visible through a window has the same brightness as the interior geometry. I understand why this is the case. Still, would there be some known workaround to resolve this issue as well?
I added two screenshots to show the issue.
Thank you in advance.
You basically need to come up with a way to darken an entire area without affecting the rest. Without light probes or lightmaps, it is tricky.
You could have a custom shader that can be easily “dimmable”, and you then control the corresponding materials by script, based on where objects are in the world, either inside (= dark) or outside (= brighter).
Hi, I found a solution for the last missing piece which works best for me: I enabled light layers. Put everything that belongs to the inside environment (room) to this layer and enable the “Indirect lighting controller” only for this layer. Objects that move from the outside environment into the room contained by the local volume will switch the light layer dynamically at runtime. Although this causes a noticeable visual effect at the borders of the local volumes especially if a object enters the local volume it fits my purpose. Thank you very much for your help.