Struggling to do interior lighting without shadows cast by walls eating up the entire shadow atlas.

[reef pivot]

I've been working on a game set in a strictly interior setting with no daylight or ambient lighting to pick up the slack. The game is set in a few enclosed rooms with one or two toggleable lamps on the ceilings. Since the lights are toggleable afaik I can't just bake GI to allow the light to permeate the room better. My issue is that if I make the range of the omni lights too large, the shadow atlas gets used up just casting the shadows of the room's walls. However if I make the range smaller, then all the corners of my rooms are pitch black. Looking for advice on how interior lighting like this is generally done or if there are any tricks for toggleable lights I don't know about.

[slim merlin]

Are your walls double sided?

[remote thunder]

First of all, the objects need a reflection. By default this is the background (currently black). Place a ReflectionProbe node in each room and the lighting will be fixed.

[remote thunder]

And finally the exposure. The environment settings has a "tonemap" panel where the exposure can be changed manually and the WorldEnvironment node also has a camera attributes resource with several auto exposure options.

I like to use the Agx tonemap with contrast=1.2, saturation=1.1 for a punchy look.

[reef pivot]

they are single sided, double siding them appears to use even more of the shadow atlas

[reef pivot]

would this continue to generate a reflection even when the light it turned off or does it update? always assumed reflection probes are another form of baking

Tried it out and yeah that works a charm! Never realised the probes had a variable update rate. Thanks a ton :D

Ah hold on seems I misunderstood, there's a pretty huge to performance hit to keep them updating, however the fact I can enclose them around a room does mean I can just mark them as invisible when the lamp is turned off and room is meant to be dark.