Indirect Light Intensity per Light

[Marn-Cant.Sergi]

Hey! I've started using Unigine again and noticed there's no way to adjust indirect light intensity per light.

As a lighting artist, I find this a bit limiting. I fully understand that this breaks PBR, but sometimes it's necessary to achieve the desired mood.

It's nice to boost the bounce lighting without overexposing direct light. Unreal and Unity offer this feature in their different lighting systems (lightmaps and dynamic lighting), and it’s a valuable tool. Other proprietary engines I've used also offer this feature, I've grown quite fond of it over the years.

Unreal's CPU Lightmapper also allows per-material and per-mesh bounce light boosts. Though I understand this could be more complex to implement.

A slider in each individual light, point lights, spotlights, sun light etc.

I'm also aware that there's an option to boost indirect light inside the voxel volume, but this is affects all the indirect lighting inside that volume, including the skylight calculation which tends to over brighten everything.

If there are any questions regarding anything I've said I'll do my best to help!

Thanks!

 

I've attached some examples in Unreal for reference.

Edited February 26, 2025 by Marn-Cant.Sergi

[Amerio.Stephane]

Hi,

I think the trick would be to disable light bounce all together for your light, and then bake the result into an environment volume. Then your environment volume would only control the bounced light. Of course, you have to do this for each light, disabling all the other one, one at a time.

Could this work?

[Marn-Cant.Sergi]

Hey! Thanks for the suggestion, but sadly this wouldn't really cut it, there's are some work around ways to get some extra bounce, I don't know how you would disable light bounce for each light if there's no setting for it (that I've been able to find at least), plus it would keep adding unnecessary memory with all the extra volumes...

I'd rather do it the traditional way, adding fake GI spotlights without shadows and some gobo texture to add detail and bounce light softly. But this isn't very convenient either.

The actual feature would be awesome and would love seeing it being added, but of course I understand that this might not be of high priority.

Again, thanks for your suggestion!

[silent]

Marn-Cant.Sergi

Thank you for the detailed description of your use case.

So far, we do not have plans to implement this functionality. However, you can achieve the same effect using a different baking technique. You can reduce the required light intensity before baking (for example, to 0.5 of the original intensity) and bake them as they are. After baking, you can return the intensity to 1.0.

In theory, you should obtain the exact results you need :)

Thanks!