light design challenge. Any ideas?

[icecreamassassin]

So I have a challenge on my hands and I'm stuck. I've designed an interior cell which has a balcony area that looks out over a simulated copy of Solitude. I've set up an auto-load door on the staircase leading down to the street and it transitions back and forth perfectly and looks great when I set the interior cell to using sky lighting.

 

I've added timed lights for the night scheme which turn on at dusk and projects some warm fire light in the rooms and with a little adjusting I think I'll get something pleasant and workable.

 

My problem is day time. when it's daytime out, the exterior of course looks fine, but inside is far too bright and washed out. Is there any way to exclude parts of a cell via room bounds perhaps where I can omit it from the standard day/night sky lit effect? or perhaps a way to place negative lights in the area to draw out the light and make it a bit dimmer?

 

I've alternately tried just using interior lighting and creating a series of "Sun" and "moon" lights that cover the exterior and cast upon the front of the house but only cover into the main room which has large windows, but the transition timing is not perfect and the lights don't match the natural sun light settings very well, so when you move through the auto door, the lighting takes a distinct change which is fairly jarring.

 

So any ideas?

[nhackett]

have you tried placing a large shadow casting object above the area?

[icecreamassassin]

Hmmm actually I have not, I'll have to give that a try, thanks

[RunningBare]

Not sure a shadow casting object will work, the issue is with color space ambient lighting, I first learned this when modding a home in open space in Fallout NV, of course it was worse there because no statics cast shadows so the abode had no self shadowing, I did try using a trigger box to lower ambient intensity while the player was inside, did not work too well because looking out the door or window the scenery was darkened, I did notice that Tomb Raider reboot does the job quite well when entering a tomb, the ambient light level drops but when looking back at where you entered it's still bright outside.

[mrpdean]

Rather than having seperate and timed day/night lights have you tried using combined lights set to use external emmittence? That way the color and brightness of the lights automatically adjusts to match the time of day.

 

You can also use this technique as a replacement to the cells ambient light. That is, set the cells ambient light to black and add a single omni light, set to use external emmittence and scaled so that it covers the entire house. That way you effectively have a dynamic ambient light. The downside of this is that it means you can't have quite as many decorative lights around the house before you run into the max "4 lights affecting each mesh" rule.

Edited September 20, 2014 by mrpdean

[icecreamassassin]

Well I'm already dealing with too many lights on one object issue so switching it to external and trimming stuff up may be the trick. I've never played with that at all, but I'll give it a shot thanks