video tutorial reference

NH docs

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Ambient Light is a special kind of point light that is used to add color to planets in the absence of any other light (like the sun).

It is affected by occlusion, so SSAO post processing and materials with occlusion textures will darken it.

Component

To get the extra controls (at the bottom), put a cookie texture on a point light.

Check NH docs for more info.

Gizmos

There are handles for the inner and outer radius of the light that you can drag.

Texture

Above is the 128x128 ambient light for Giant's Deep.

The x axis is "time of day" (left is unused, middle is day side, right is night side). You can see how it's darker on the night side because less light gets there.

The y axis is surface direction (top is facing away from light, middle is perpendicular to the light, bottom is facing towards light). If you put an ambient light at the center of your planet, the floor will be the top, the wall will be the middle, and the ceiling will be the bottom. You can use this to approximate sky lighting (atmosphere color on the top for floors) and bounce lighting from the floor (floor color on the bottom for ceilings). You can see this is done above.

The entire left half of the texture is unused. I'm not sure why they did it this way.

[!IMPORTANT] When importing the texture, set Texture Shape to Cube and Mapping to Cylindrical.

[!IMPORTANT] Uncheck Advanced > Generate Mip Maps to prevent weird pixelated edges.