How do I get a "golden hour" effect with Lighting

[CenterWalled]

Please tell me if this is the wrong category.

I’m working on a game with a friend, and I’m trying to find the perfect atmosphere setting.

I’m trying to get a “golden hour” or sunset effect in my game:

I want the atmosphere in my experience to look like the image above. The only problem is that it actually looks like this: (since I used a photo filter)

Any suggestions on how to get my atmosphere to look more like the first picture? Which settings should change?

Sorry about the bad picture quality. Look at the game thumbnails for better pictures.

[keremMCT (Pepsi_Cat)]

Use a different skybox or maybe some color correction. Tweak the values until you get what you want.

[CenterWalled]

Do you know what values are best for editing the atmosphere?

[keremMCT (Pepsi_Cat)]

I dont know anything about atmosphere, maybe the documentation can help

[IrishStukov (Irish)]

changing the time in lighting can really work wonders, and getting a more orange hue’d skybox would help as well. changing your ambience is also another important factor when it comes to that golden hour effect.

making lighting is all about editing it to see how it looks best

[AnomalousBob (Bobmatzzi)]

I haven’t actually tried to do a golden hour effect in years for Roblox. But I think that going into the science can help get a better grasp of what you’re looking for!

Information in this reply is basically extrapolated from this Wikipedia article, but I’ll add my subjective interpretation as it can help bridge it into Studio.

What is the Golden Hour?

To make sure we’re on the same page, the Golden Hour is a period that happens twice during daytime in which the Sun is so close to the horizon that its light is scattered more thoroughly across the atmosphere, and casts straighter directional shadows; despite that fact light is so scattered that it bounces homogeneously creating evenly lit objects when in the shadow.

So, with that out of the way, let’s dive into the actual process.
We can take from the definition the key factors: the Atmosphere must be hazy, the Sun light will be intense, and the shadows noticable but not too dark. Let’s see some reference examples:

Some Golden Hour examples

From the examples we can narrow down some things we want especially through experimentation, I made a quick scene to see how I’d work it out:

My crack at it

Some things to note are the Atmosphere making up most of the work of the light scatter, and the diverging hues of color between the Sun itself (which is at abooout light temperature 3000K, a bit warmer than the Golden hour which I felt was nicer) and the shadows being defined by a purple OutdoorAmbient.

Anyway, sorry if that was some overwhelming technical text but I think it can help to share the way I envisioned it so that you can follow the same steps and understand :^)
I will put up my test which I made in about 15 minutes, it’s not perfect so I suggest you build on it!

GoldenHourTest.rbxl (397.8 KB)

If you want to achieve an effect more similar to the 2nd and 3rd examples I recommend you mess with the Ambient and ExposureCompensation properties, along with the Lighting Children’s properties to get a more contrasted look, like here:

I hope this was helpful

[VGVC2]

If you’d rather not read the wall of text provided by AnomalousBob (It’s still handy information), the simple and quick solution is to just adjust ColorShift_Top and perhaps OutdoorAmbient to your liking.

[CenterWalled]

Thank you!! This was REALLY helpful @AnomalousBob and @VGVC2!