When you create a new level in Unreal Engine, chances are that they come with a pre-defined outdoor light setup consisting of the following items:
- a Directional Light
- a Sky Atmosphere
- a Sky Light
- Volumetric Clouds
- and Exponential Height Fog
I was wondering how to change the size of the sun disk in the sky to create more dramatic sunset scenes without resorting to a plugin like Ultra Dynamic Sky, where we have a setting for that.
Turns out that with the default Lumen outdoor lighting, we can change the Source Angle on the Directional Light to change the sun size. Compare the above screenshot with this one at the bottom. The default Source Angle is 0.5357, while I’ve changed the one below to 40. Much bigger impact!
Note that doing so will also change the softness of the shadows, with larger values creating softer shadows (as is the case with every light source).
Help! My default light looks totally different. How do I get this setup?
Unreal Engine has a great feature called the Environment Light Mixer (it’s a tab under Window). It lets us create great looking default lights for outdoor scenes. Simply delete all existing outdoor light objects from your scene, then use the Environment Light Mixer to create all the above components from scratch. The mixer also lets you make adjustments from one handy place without having to hunt down every object needed for outdoor lighting in the Outliner.
Happy sunsetting!