Realistic lighting in interior

Godot Version

Godot 4.3

Question

Realistic interior

What would you recommend to add here to make it more realistic. Currently I am using reflection prob only.
Thank you.

use PBR materials, reduce ambient light sky contribution, and check out my tutorial on realistic lighting:

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As I can see this tutorial about exterior lighting. But I am looking for interior lighting.

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Did you see the end where he talks about interiors and reflection probes?

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Add VoxelGI, and adjust it’s properties like enable the Interior settings, etc.

But keep it mind you should need to use PBR materials for the realistic result.

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interior, exterior, same thing. the tutorial is about setting the sun and environtment and GI for a scene. this scene can be interior or exterior, because godot is a modern engine.
You can’t see it in the pictures I showed, but I tested these settings with interior scenes included.
the little house has an interior and it works, and the same for the ruins. you can see how the changes add shadows instead of being plain.

lighting is about adding the GI so we can get shadows on the nooks and crannies of our level, and that includes buildings.
It is very easy to just have a sun and the default GI, and then interiors look like your picture. My tutorial is precisely to avoid that situation.

VoxelGI is the most expensive (although best looking) GI solution. he’s probably using reflection-probes for a reason, and it CAN be enough.
VoxelGI is really good for closed and somewhat small levels, and for small scenes. Like if I had to make the bar from Liar’s bar I would use a VoxelGI and it would look just as good as unreal.

but it’s not a solution for everything, it is expensive and also limited by size. the bigger the VoxelGI, the lesser the quality, and at one point where it gets to big, it doesn’t make a difference anymore. that point is 200-400 meters.
It also works best with levels that can fit inside a box. if your level has an irregular shape that goes to much into a direction there can be a lot of wasted space and loss of quality.

PBR materials are very much important.

another advice would be to use higher polycount for the walls, ceiling and floor, more than just 2 tris, add rims and bevels, make the edges connected so they can be smooth, at the same time don’t waste geometry in too small objects like a lock of the door being a 64 side cylinder.

and add as many things as possible to make the scene interesting, such as plants, furniture, decals of cracked walls and smudges of paint, mold, stains, fingerprints on metal, mop lines on tiles.
make the textures for floor, walls and ceiling different, and use different textures for different rooms, and prevent repetition.
cover repetition and seams with objects.

and another way of making a level look better is to add something that moves (anything).
examples for this room: a ceiling fan, flowing curtains (these can be animated or even softbody), dangling light creating a shadow from wires or plants, cars moving seen through the window, birds flying, bugs swarming.
or think of something else.

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My target is making this interior looks realistic as much as possible. This is only possible using only lightmap baking but the lightmap does not work properly, showing some weird artifacts. One more thing, reflection prob with interior option turned on, voxelGi does not work.

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Don’t need to use VoxelGI, just use Reflection probe, and adjust the world environment settings like SAOO, SSR, etc… Here is an interior based graphics demo, you can check it.

You can easily get this result by doing everything properly:


Here I used reflection probes and materials from megascans which is best for photorealitic materials.

Yeah the reflection looks odd for a mistake but I fixed it now.

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it depends on what specs you are aiming for. lightmap needs a powerful comp to render but it’s relatively cheap once it’s done, the problem is shadows will be static.
the other cheap option is reflectionprobes.

but if you are not worried about performance, there are other options.
if your level is not very big, use a VoxelGI, it also supports dynamic lighting if you need that. if your entire scene is just a house or that room you showed, use a VoxelGI, cover the entire area that will be visible, including the exterior. this will give the best quality. VoxelGI can then be tweaked to get different results.
but if you need open exteriors and large levels, you have to do either SDFGI, which is low quality but better for complex levels with lots of rooms and uneven surfaces, or use many reflectionprobes, which will work for buildings like houses and other like in my tutorials.

lightmap needs high quality baking, high resolution, and this can become a very large file easily. it is also prone to some artifacts, to solve these you would have to wait for 4.4 where they made some upgrades.

don’t turn on interior, there are windows in your room. do make sure the reflectionprobe covers the entire space of the room and combine more than one in non-square areas, remember that a reflectionprobe is always a sphere, and that sphere exists inside the cube shown in the editor. that’s why reflection probes have options to extend the distance past the cube.
as to why voxelGI is not working, could be a hundred different things, like drivers, your GPU, or bad combination of settings. but don’t use reflection probes with voxelGI, they do the same thing, voxelGI creates reflections (better ones) and better GI.

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The explanation I was waiting for. Nicely explained, thank you so much.

One more issue, voxelGi without reflection prob causes emitting light from roof. It seems the roof is glowing.

that is a normal glitch of light leaking. It can be made less visible by tweaking the settings of the VoxelGI.
but also, make sure the cells are aligned as best as possible with the geometry, so that a cell doesn’t end up cut between the inside and outside of the world.
also you need inner and outer walls, and preferably thick enough. if your scene is just going to be interior, you can also just add blocks to the outside to block light.
remember that faces in 3D are one-sided, the visible side blocks light while the other side lets light pass. There was a case where I had a terrain with voxel GI and the models got light from the bottom with a day-night cycle where the sun rotated around the world, so I had to add a wall to block light coming from under the world.

Add VoxelGI, and adjust it’s properties like enable the Interior settings, etc.

But keep it mind you should need to use PBR materials for the realistic result.

don’t enable interior. interior is for interior scenes. there’s a window in this scene.

not always. a scene can be made with simple materials and some people will consider it good and be tricked by it. Road to vostok doesn’t use PBR materials.