Making dark rooms using HDRP

Is there any way to make only one room dark? Environment is making this room bright but I want to make it completely dark without changing everything else.

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Normally you’d approach this by creating a local Volume and assigning a different volume profile to it.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.render-pipelines.high-definition@7.1/manual/Volumes.html#configuring-a-local-volume

Hey, the room is being lit by the sky, hence it is very bright.

To darken it, you need to change the local light contribution by

  1. Baking the lighting, either with lightmaps and/or light probes. You need to mark the render mesher to contribute to GI, and then bake the light using the Windows > Lighting tool.
  2. Place one or more reflection probes to correctly reflect the interior of the dark room, rather than the sky. By default, HDRP always reflects the sky.

Using a local volume, for instance with Indirect Lighting Controller component can help, however this will impact the indirect lighting in the entire world, from the camera perspective, and this might not be wanted obviously, as you don’t want the exterior to become darker, but only the interior.

By impacting the entire world you mean like looking into the room via a doorway from outside? Or that volumes are limited to simple geometry so they would invariably span some of the outside?

Hey, I’m a little confused about how this will help. Let’s say this is a small cave, nothing inside is reflective. How will adding reflection probes effect the walls? My assumption was that it wouldn’t, and I tried it and can’t see it making any difference (but maybe I did something wrong).

If you have no reflection probe, the default reflection probe is used, which is usually a reflection probe of the sky.

So the interior reflects the sky, which is much brighter than the interior would be, making its appearance brighter than it should be.

Also make sure your meshes are marked as static.

All surfaces and materials bounce light around. In games, for a variety of reasons, we have split the way the light bounces around in diffuse and reflective ways, but all materials have both of those properties.

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