Best way to do indoor/outdoor lighting change ?

joel127

I have a big world with outdoor environment and indoor caves/dungeons. Here: https://godotforums.org/discussion/21315/istor-dragon

I need to have the mountains/hills cast shadows that are not too dark to simulate indirect lighting. My issue is that the inside of caves are not dark enough. If I lower ambient lighting the caves are dark enough but the outdoor shadows are too dark.

I'm thinking of several possibilities: - Reduce ambient lighting and add a directional light top to bottom to simulate indirect lighting, but then it won't look right on trees/rocks I guess. - Use GI probes ? I don't have any experience with them, but I don't want to have to place probes everywhere, we have a big world. - Change the environment settings when entering a cave ?

What is the best way to do this ?

Megalomaniak

@joel127 said: - Change the environment settings when entering a cave ?

I would wager this to be the best. GI probes aren't really a good solution for outdoors type environment, iirc. Not to say that they aren't worth experimenting with. Might be able to use both in combination even. But the GI probes would likely come with a fairly heavy performance hit and your art assets look like they cater to lower end devices too so it might be worth leveraging that.

The primary difficulty with the quoted option is that you would have to create a manager node for it, I guess.

joel127

mm... ok, I can use areas and do an animation to smoothly change the ambiant light, not sure if it will look weird or not, it's worth a try.

Thanks!