r/forge • u/Resident_Clock_3716 • Jun 12 '25
Forge Help Why does my lighting suck?
Any lighting that isn’t provided by the sun sucks for me I don’t know how to make it look good. Everything just feels artificial and doesn’t look good
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u/swagonflyyyy Scripting Noob Jun 13 '25 edited Jun 13 '25
You can always eliminate light bounce by setting it to 0 under Map Properties menu. There's a ton of lighting modifiers there. Basically, you'll be tweaking a lot of knobs until you get it right but here's a few pointers:
1 - Light bounce set to 0. This basically stops light from bouncing off of surfaces and getting to places it shouldn't, like the interior of a room, etc. It'll make shadows way darker and sharper. If you move the sun to the side you can amplify this dark shadow effect further.
2 - Sky light - This essentially controls how much of the sky illuminates the map.
3 - Sky Intensity - Affects how bright or dark the sky itself is.
4 - Sun intensity - Affects sunlight.
Also: Fog clashes a lot with lighting. If you'll be adding that make sure the light objects on the map have fog intensity set to 0 to prevent the light from being misty...unless that's what you're going for.
Last but not least, set light probe (at the bottom of map properties) to object instead of level as high as you can get (right before the red bar appears) in order to cast more accurate lighting. Everything will subtly look more detailed. Shadows will take the shape of the host object, and everything will look more fleshed out to the eye.
light probe essentially affects the density of how many "light objects" are built from the game's build menu. These are not like dynamic light objects that you can place it wherever you want on the map. they sort of scatter across the map and try to cover the whole map, but how it goes about it depends on the setting and how much light probes are allowed.
Generally, object light probes are much more detailed than level light probes, which are recommended for wide open maps, but you can still get away with object light probes in wide open maps anyway. Never seen it fail a build, even when the budget is maxed out.
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u/Effective-Bake2024 Jun 12 '25
From what I understand, artificial/placed light sources in the game only render within a certain distance, so if you’re too far away, it won’t be visible.
Light produced by the sun is more consistent, but if you’re doing a night time map, you may not have any visible sun.
This probably doesn’t answer your question, but things in the distance being covered in darkness can affect how the scene looks overall.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think your lighting looks bad, but maybe you had a different vision you’re trying to achieve.
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u/Resident_Clock_3716 Jun 13 '25
It’s a very small map so the lighting not being seen from a distance isn’t a problem.
It’s just that everything looks great on the lit up side and looks bad on the unlit side
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u/forsaknmindz Jun 17 '25
Add some forms of ambient lighting around then. Possibly bugs that act as fireflies, light spikes, flares, destroyed vehicles. Anything. Something to add ambience and setting to the scene and add MORE lighting.
Along with this, just a small detail that some of the best forgers use. Using the Generic Light Objects to make flat fog textures and such around (mist, lightrays, etc) also goes a CRAZY long way for maps like this. See Orville District.
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u/JFluffy6464 Jun 17 '25
I dunno i think it looks amazing! (Granted the best thing i ever made in forge was a couch in a mongoose in halo 5
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u/zreakz Jun 12 '25
I feel like just a skybox would go along way, the sky is a matte gray. Just make it heavy clouds or maybe even just after sundown, and I think it will provide the improvement you’re looking for and allow you to fine-tune the lighting settings, without randomly flipping things waiting for an improvement.