How to properly and professionally light rooms?

[Lord_Zombs (Snow)]

For my current game I am using Realistic Lighting which makes poor lighting much more obvious.

So I was wondering how do u go about actually lighting up larger or rooms in general. Most tutorials I found online only explained what each light type does or more how to do “realistic lighting”, which was basically just setting up renders not actual fully playable rooms.

Placing a giant surface part over the room does light everything up nicely, especially at lower brightness values but makes the character look weird when moving since theres no shadows and just generally it seems like a poor practice.

And placing a bunch of point lights sort of offset from the middle seems like a bad idea as well. Generally I am just totally lost on when to use what and how to go about it. Any ideas or links to guides would be much apppreaciated.

My current example where I have no clue how to light it.

[af_2048]

I’d say

but it’s post processing.
Your images lack contrast.
Darkness does not mean there should be no bright colors, because human sigh adapts.
Things that lost in darkness are: details and colors, that’s how humans see.

[Lord_Zombs (Snow)]

I mean the room is supposed to be bright I just showed an unlit pic so its better to see. My problem is what to do, if I want to evenly light it I can put a big surface light on top but then it all looks so tycoon and simulator like without any shadows on the player and it feels off. So what else am I supposed to do?

Use spotlights? Or point lights? If so how? That’s basically what I have been wondering about, like how do I actually go about properly lighting a room beyond “just put one big point light in the middle” since that then results in glare on textures and is pretty weird.