Problem with Lights

so am working on a game and stuff and currently with how i have Godot and blender set up i have it so both match, since am going to make the cutscenes in blender, and it helps since i know what i’ll make in blender should look the same in Godot but currently i am Fighting with a problem that i’ve ran into regarding lights

The 2 images am going to show are in test scenes i setup, using the main character for what am working on, Might seem old or what you might considered bad (tho i wouldn’t), but its suppose to be something thats just cartoony looking and not ment to be realistic looking in way, shape or form, and specificly be a mix between 3D looking stuff thats stylized, and what could almost look 2D at times that is stylized

Ok i hate the fact i have to ACTUALLY mention this in my post, The problem is the fact that as the light gets closer, it makes it look like the character had emission turned on duo to the brightness i have use as i have no way it seems like to adjust the actual distance of the light, The problem has NOTHING to do with shadows or anything, I legitmently hate the fact i ACTUALLY have to mention this since the real problem is right there clear as day in the 3.5.1 image when comparing how both look


This image is in 2.79, This is what am expecting for how the lights should look


This is in 3.5.1 using eevee and yes i have made sure the Materials are setup right, There is some tiny differences but not anything Thats too big to make it look like this

my problem is that the Light is too bright, but i cannot just simply turn it down as turning it down will make it too dark and using Radius to increase its size does not work as i want shadows, but it makes the shadows become basicly non-existent

and i have attempted stacking lights too, with one radius but no shadows and one with shadows,This does not work either duo to how bright the first light is with the radius

and i have tried using custom distance too, but sadly it appears capped as anything over 100 contiunes to stay as tho it was 100, or even 40 for that matter

i would use cycles but cycles has 3 problems

The Shader to RGB nodes, do not work, and Emission nodes create light, while it makes sense in reality, duo to the fact i am making something cartoony and want those effects where a characters eyes glow in the dark and only the eyes, That one is kinda a problem

Also Cycles might be a bit slow possibly, even with using GPU which does make it slightly faster

so yea just, any way to fix this would be nice as its basicly making it impossible for me to actually make indoor scenes of any kind in 3.5.1, even if i wasn’t making something cartoony i feel as tho it would be impossible duo to this issue as that Bright light it causes on things like the face just looks… Ugly and bad, compared to in 2.79 where it doesn’t do this and looks good still with the lighting

if there was a way to modify specificly all the lights in a scene and make them have bigger distance, i’d be fine with this as i can easily adjust them to make them smaller if i needed to, so adjusting all to have bigger distance would be fine if theres away to do this, since as of right now i basiclly cannot make indoor scenes duo to how the lighting seems to work in 3.5.1

and annoying as am trying to switch from using 2.79 as i have gotten sick of the slow raytracer it uses, PLUS the fact i need the latest glTF exporter

and Yes lights are basicly in about the same spots or at least as much as i could get them to be

and the way the character is posed isn’t really effecting it much either, as its still the same regardless

and it does not look this way using suns either, infact both look almost identical on both using a sun, but not with using pointlights, arealights or directional lights

You can duplicate your light source, disable it from casting shadows and use "custom attenuance, and set it to a value you like.

um… i don’t have a custom attenuance option? i have custom distance but that doesn’t appear to do much as i mentioned in my post

You must be doing something wrong. There’s no way you can’t adjust the intensity of the light.

Maybe I’m not understanding your problem then. As I understood you want the shadows to make this gradient effect behind the character, right? Or did I miss something?

my problem is that the Light gets way too bright as the character gets closer, This makes it basicly impossible for me to make good looking indoor scenes as anything too close just looks as if it just got emission turned on as i have to make the lights bright in order to make the rooms bright enough and not look insanely dark, This didn’t happen in 2.79 unless i actually made the light alot brighter then what you see in the 2.79 image, compared to how it looks in 3.5.1 where i had to make it more brigher to get the same amount, but ends up not working duo how it makes the character look up close

your image for example, has this issue too, its too bright up close and it just doesn’t look good, but its a problem since i cannot just make the light less dark, otherwise the rooms just look like they have no light at all, Plus the lights are on the ceiling (in an indoor scene i was working on)a bit higher up compared to where the model of the character is, so it just all ends up looking really dark if i try to have it at an amount that doesn’t make the character look like crap if it gets too close but makes the room bright and not look really dark

In my example, I did not try to adjust the light. Only show the principle.
In this case, it’s not so bright.


This is the scene btw where i found the issue am having with lights

it might look bright enough but for how i want the scene to look, its not currently, and for sure with how the character looks as things do not look as bright as i want them to be, but i don’t want the light to be so bright that the character turns to crap as it gets closer and starts to look like emission got turned on


This is with the lights at 160, with diffuse and specular set at 4, now the room looks bright but if the character gets too close to the light source, they look like emission was turned on (right now they look fine as they’re not insanely close to it atm or close enough for that to start to happen, but areas where it needs lights this bright that it can get close too, it will happen with)

It will be helpful if you post the scene, so that we don’t have to guess as to how you’re setting everything up. You can remove the the monkey, as it seems to not be relevant to the issue (IE, it appears the text scene only needs the light, the floor, and the cube, with associated materials.)

Are you sure your scene is built correctly? I mean, is the tone of grey what it should be and not darker than you think so when you compensate the light to look “correct” it’s actually too bright? You need to remember that a lot changed since 2.79.

What is the value of grey you are using there?

if your character is too bright dial down your albedo brightness a bit, or don’t put a light so close to them. use the shader to rgb note to bump up the floor to the brightness you want. in so far as it being impossible to get good indoor results with eevee/cycles (even outside of the style you’re doing, as you claim), i think there’s an entire gallery of art on this site that disputes that.

at the end of the day, the old blender internal renderer is a patchwork of hacks. it certainly is not based on some better or more accurate representation of reality. likely you’d just set things up in a way that worked good for that engine, but you need to adjust those values for different rendering platforms.

I believe, “reality” is the last of his concerns here. :joy:

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Light problem.blend (1007.4 KB)

to point out, am not actually using the normal PBR shaders either, am infact using a custom shader setup that recreates the phong shading or at least something functions close enough to it

And Yes am aware the light’s strength is setup high, but thats because i can’t get it to the same amount of light atm without doing that or the same distance of light i should say thats seen in the 2.79 screenshot, so i know how bright it is, is effecting that too, but that seems like its the only way am able to actually get the light to reach the same distance that it does in 2.79, since in 2.79 the custom distance worked properly compared to how it seems to in 3.5.1 where it doesn’t and appears caped almost, where radius seems to act more like the real custom distance but i can’t change that as it effects the softness of the shadows

Yes. I have been reading the discussion about that.

yea, it is correct as far as i know, i do switch the color management to Standard instead of filmic but thats about it

Ok, first up: The original image you posted has a white cube. Your example file has a red cube. So immediately, I’m not able to to see exactly what you had set up in the original images that illustrate your problem. Is making the Saturation “0” sufficient, or have you also changed something else?

is this what you’re looking for?


just change the materials color, it was cause i decided to include the custom shader

Scale everything up, light strength is proportional to size

(change the color to white btw)


should look closer to this

I should mention i also noticed in 2.79 it seems the lights act a little differently as it does not appear to get as insanely bright to the character if its up close and stays the same might of brightness up close, unless its setup in a custom way to do so

Bear in mind: I don’t have 2.79, so I can only compare 3.5 results to whatever you create in 2.79, as an example. I cannot chase your settings around the scene, hoping to find what you’ve actually done.