Question The best practice for night scenes with baked overcast sky

Hey everyone,

I've been working on a scene where it can be day or night. I've checked out the Unity video on HDRP:

and in this case a lightmap bake is done with an overcast sky. This works great for various daytime lighting setups, but I was wondering what the best practice is when also having a night lighting setup.

Is it correct to have an indirect lighting controller for this and lowering the baked lightmaps a ton, or is there another way to do this properly? With the lowered values I can set the exposure to a more realistic value of -1 to 2, but I could also not lower the indirect lighting and instead have a high exposure to darken the scene. (Which would be less realistic)

The goal here would be to have a foggy but moonlit scene where you can still see objects clearly.

Thanks in advance!

 

In terms of baking indirect lighting, yes. If you bake with a neutral overcast which is frequently within the 10ev zone, you do have a nice amount of indirect lighting information for maybe +4/-3ev with that single bake.

Night is night so if you did the same you'd need to bake around 0 or 1 ev maybe 2 to give you a ~+/-3 EV range to word with.the range is less accurate further afield the ev.

If you typically want to set up a foggy scene with things visible you'll have to consider what "visible" is.

A foggy or overcast night is often around -2ev for your exposure setting, which if you have fog and a 0.5 lux moon already should actually be quite bright.

Moonlight has about 4100 for colour temperature and to tune that to the "typical" night we see and what is usually pronounced in movies would that start to move from physical accurate values, into post FX realms.

I would set your scene as you lighting and exposure you would have for a night scene, monitor your indirect lighting. You could use SSGI, to give you a rough idea of what that is and then go from there toward baking a lower EV scene and utilise post to fine tune the final thematics of what you need.
Hope that makes some sense.

 

Thanks for the insights/help! I was hoping to not need 2 bakes in order to have both day/night as an option, but rather have some other way I might've missed. As this is for a game, and having multiple bakes for every level would severely increase its size.