Help with indoors lighting

I have huge problems with making nice lighting indoors. You see, in my game, there are a lot of long hallways and in order to illuminate them, I use PointLights with the Shadows property disabled. And the light amount quickly got out of hand.


(Using Light Editor to see all the light sources)

And this is just a small portion of it. Do you have any tips that would help me make nice lighting without putting a billion PointLights everywhere, dropping the FPS to the floor? Thanks.


  • What are you attempting to achieve? Beautiful indoors lighting.
  • What is the issue? The total amount of the PointLights is unacceptable and it lags the game to a point where it is unplayable at high graphics levels.
  • What solutions have you tried so far? Using big SurfaceLights.

  • What solutions have you tried so far? Using big SurfaceLights.

Here’s a little detail on the SurfaceLights part.

Putting big SurfaceLights all over the celling was a great way of minimizing the light source count while maintaining good looks, however, there were many flaws in it that made me change my mind and not use them.


Unrealistic lighting. As if I was using ShadowMap instead of Future. I don't see the NormalMap/RoughnessMap effects.

For instance, here’s how it looks when I use PointLights.

As you can see, it looks terrible comparing to PointLights. However, that is not all;


Some sort of an artifact. I am not sure what is it, but I don't want to see it.

ANY tips are appreciated. I’ve been dealing with this problem for a big while now.

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what if you mix the two?

like just enough point lights to keep the PBR effects.

also, do you think you could make the point lights bigger? is there any issue with that? (if they aren’t max size already)

also also, maybe mess around with the lighting properties? (If possible)

May be unrelated to the topic;

game.Lighting.EnvironmentDiffuseScale = 0
game.Lighting.EnvironmentSpecularScale = 0
^ both attempt to get rid of any outside lighting that come in between the walls.

game.Lighting.Ambient = 0
^ makes the indoor dark letting you mess around with lighting sources

LightPoint not highly bright with shadows turned on and wide(range approx. 20~30)

Add possibly a beam sticking out of the lights.

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SurfaceLights can look great… if done right. Seems to not be done right in that specific scene.

This is why we need a higher light range!