Hey @
Does that mean that if I have ISO 100 and 1/125s as well as EV 16, I need to set exposure compensation to 11,11 to get the result I expect?
Why not build the system in a way that the values above WITHOUT exposure compensation put out what everyone expects?
What do you mean most scenes are made for an EV100 of -1.2? Do you mean other tools work that way? Because no one has been building stuff for Unreals new exposure so far…at least to my awareness. Also, if all other people assume -1.2 is the default and everyone is used to these values, why then change it and confuse everyone?
And last but not least…why do auto exposure and manual mode work differently, to begin with? That’s just basically asking for beef between level lighters and cutscene lighters cause their values don’t work together.
I am not trying to be bitchy here and I really am sorry if it comes across that way. But I just can’t make any sense out of this. I have worked with almost all available engines and some in-house tech as well and I have worked with Unreal 4 since 2011 and I have NEVER come across a system as cumbersome as this cause nothing really relates to each other or to some known good values. Everything is just random eyeballing etc T_T
And in regards to physical values in general…here is another example:
When I lit the Deathstar for Battlefront 2, a lot of the lighting magic comes from the emissive shapes on the walls. These emissive shapes have a visual emissive value and also actually contribute to the lighting…like lightmass emissive.
At first, the level looked super flat and there was not a lot of material interaction with nice roughness and spec on surfaces and characters looked dull as well. The level lighting itself looked kick *** though! So I was like: what the hell is wrong here?!?!?
In the end, it turned out to be the emissive values. The thing is, depending on your bloom and exposure settings, emissive value of 5 and 500 can look the same visually…but since we render in HDR, the values are still there even though they might not be visible per so.
So what happened was that the emissive visually kinda looked correct, but in relation to physical exposure, it was too weak and this didn’t render as strong enough value into the reflection capture. Once I increased the emissive values to be in line with local light lumen values in the level, it visually looked the same, but the HDR values that got captured for the reflection were way higher, thus really pushing the look and making everything come together nicely. Suddenly, I had sexy materials and a lot of interaction 
That’s why I personally believe, physical values “can” be VERY important