Why use directional light in a crypt map?

[Adam_Shultis]

I gave this a lot of thought and I’m not entirely confident that adding a directional light is worth the amount of work involved to repair its damages. As per Unreal’s documentation, The Directional Light simulates light that is being emitted from a source that is infinitely far away (a lot like a sun). But what are we trying to do in this map? Trying to create a dark, possibly undergound crypt with a entrance that appears to be outside (even though it’s just a closed in area). Essentially we just need the courtyard lit like it has sun (5% of the map) and the rest of the map to not be touched by the sun (95% of the map). So if I add in a directional light, now 100% of the map is covered by the sun’s light and there’s endless bleeding over 95% of the map where there shouldn’t be light. So now you have to cover this area with either box brushes (like the demonstration used), planes (that was previously used in an Unreal Environment Design course), or a ceiling of static meshes (like he’s doing in this video). But why? Who’s going to see it? The player cannot leave the crypt or fly over it.

I’m not sure if there’s a better way to cover sunlight over a small portion of the map but I feel a directional light is just too far reaching. It’s great for outdoor maps but inside, not so much. Maybe use Spotlights to give that light shining into the crypt look?

So I just removed my directional light from the map and now I don’t have to cover the ceilings because it’s the perfect darkness I need to continue.

[Anthony_F]

You know what, I have to agree. This has actually been very frustrating for a few weeks now. I’m having an extremely hard time eliminating the light bleed from some of my rooms and I’ve even tried surrounding them in boxes. It seems like whenever I look in the direction of my sun the entire room gets daylight bright, but if I look away it’s almost impossible to see. I might just do what you say and remove the Directional Light entirely.

[Anthony_F]

I took one last attempt at fixing the light bleed. I looked at another post and noticed someone mentioned using primitive cubes. So I just scaled a few cubes over my walls, ceilings, and floors and everything looks fantastic. I had to use 16 cubes since my layout is a little weird, but it is pitch black. I still agree that the Directional Light is unnecessary in this situation, I think the real purpose was to teach us about it instead of a practical use case.

[Adam_Shultis]

I do remember playing with the directional light and found that if you rotate the directional light upwards, you’ll have a difficult time blocking out the light. And that’s where the difficulty lies, moving the directional light upwards gives you a more sunset to night look but also doesn’t work in enclosed spaces. So if you want it to work right, just leave it pointing at the ground for the daylight look.

[Nahor]

I guess it depends on what you want to do with your map. Having the directional light means you can create opening/cracks anywhere and have a consistent lighting each time.
It’s also a more generic method. This particular game/lesson is mostly underground but most game environments have some form of outdoor (even if it’s just through windows) where you might need this “trick”.

[Ryan_Premack]

True… but for the purposes of learning Unreal (aka the point of this course), you’re going to need to know how to handle different lighting cases coexisting in the same scene like this.

[acecase]

As mentioned a couple of times, I’m pretty sure the point here was to demonstrate the usage or the standard setup, but I do agree with the OP here. A much better solution is to turn visibility off on the directional light, so that it’s just used to set the position of the sun, and then use a spotlight at the entrance.

Looks fine.