How to hide the glow of a directional light for a night time scene?

[Knuthnads]

I’m setting up a night time scene and need to hide the glow from a directional light that acts as moonlight.

Specifically this part:

Basically I’m going to have a flat plane with a moon texture in the sky at that location, so I need to turn off the glow coming from the directional light.

I’ve had a look at all the options in the directional light itself as well as in SkyAtmosphere, but could not find anything that affected the size or visibility of this glow.

None of the tutorials I’ve seen on YouTube so far have address this.

There is one workaround that does successfully hide this part of the glow and that’s to add a BP_Sky_Sphere to the scene:

However as you can see it also seems to prevent the volumetric clouds from appearing for unknown reasons.

For reference I’m working in UE 5.2.1. I’m not sure if this is something fixed in 5.3+.

If anyone would like to try and reproduce this issue on their end, I am running the following console commands in the Level Blueprint, not sure how relevant they are to the volumetric cloud problem:

r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.ScreenTraces.HZBTraversal 0
r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.DownsampleFactor=8
r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.TracingOctahedronResolution=16
r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.FullResolutionJitterWidth=0.5
r.VolumetricRenderTarget.Mode 2
r.VolumetricFog.GridPixelSize 4
r.Lumen.DiffuseIndirect.SSAO 1
r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.ShortRangeAO 0

[Knuthnads]

A workaround is to add BP_Sky_Sphere to hide the glow. If you have volumetric clouds in your scene as well and they’re disappearing, make sure you’re NOT running this command: r.VolumetricRenderTarget.Mode 2.