How to adjust self-shadows

I have a scene with a single directional “sun” light. It was casting very dark shadows (pic1). I didn’t want my shadow’s quite so dark, so I changed the shadow-strength property of my light to .25. This change fixed all shadows that objects were casting on other objects - these shadows were now lighter. However, the shadows an object casts on itself are as dark as ever (pic2). How do I change the brightness of self-shadows, so it matches the new brightness of other shadows?


The way I solved this was to increase the ambient light on the entire scene, then dial down the sun’s intensity to compensate. You can set ambient light to a solid color or gradient in Window > Lighting, or change it on the fly in C# via RenderSettings.ambientLight.