Hello everyone, so I’ve been wondering how to fix this problem for at least a good week now.
So I’m developing this game and it’s 90% inside a facility. We’re trying to maintain it realistic, we do know it will mostly require high-end pc’s and might not run so well in low-end.
Let’s get to the problem, we basically created rooms and need to have ceiling lights of course. But turns out the light coming from the ceiling lights doesn’t appear to reflect on the floor thus iluminating the ceiling. Like it happens in real life, as any surface will bounce a % of the light back.
I keep wondering how to fix this. One way I found is to add a big surface under the map and add a surfacelight to it, however when we look down we can actually see the light coming from under the map.
Any ideas we might fix this? Probably you will also say to add lights on the top of the ceiling light pointing towards the ceiling but this creates weird shadows.
While it certainly isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, and you could potentially be already doing this, I’ve found that putting the lights themselves inside a part below the light, and not the light brick, fixes this issue.
What I’ve just said is a jumbled mess (at least to me, I can’t read lol), so here’s a visual demonstration:
This picture is from an old showcase of mine; you have the light fixture itself, and the red part is where the PointLight is actually located. See how it allows it to shine in all directions, including towards the ceiling. It also helps performance as you don’t need to create any extra lights to do this.
In fact, I’m pretty sure this is actually standard practice when designing levels for games.
The only issue with this method is that it creates weird shadows if you get too close to the light part.
I don’t really mind it, but I can imagine this would be really undesirable for some people… It really just depends on what you want and the design of your map.
Well I’m using a spotlight thus probably changing it to pointlight can easily fix that like you said. Also I found out my Ambient was way too dark so I messed with it around a bit until I found something desirable. But I’m marking you as solution as that would totally work.
