I am working in version Unreal Engine 5.3.
I created a Material that uses “BentNormal” and after seeing it work well in “Mesh Preview”, I placed the model in the level, but when I placed it in the level, the effect of BentNormal did not seem to be applied correctly.
(I toggled the property that applies “BentNormal” to the Material Instance to see if that made a difference).
Could it be the light source or post-processing applied to the level?
I am using the Lumen setting. I have disabled the “Allow Static Lighting” setting in the Project Settings.
Could I be missing something?
First, It requires an AO to be plugged in. You haven’t mentioned if it is or isnt.
Second, bent normals are essentially for static lightghing. Lumen being dynamic … what are you trying to do?
If you also disable static lighting, then what is the expectation?
I plugged in AO. Oops. I forgot to mention that.
I recently learned that BentNormal can be used to improve AO, and I’ve been experimenting with it.
From the toast description of the “Allow Static Lighting” item in the Engine Settings, it seemed that disabling it would allow Materials that use AO and BentNormal to work with Lumen Global Illumination.
I followed the guide below as a walkthrough.
If its on a skeletal mesh, you likely have to enable another 10001 settings to get it working. So let people know if thats the case…
According to the write up, yes, it seems that enabling that and having static lights in place would cause the values to be calculated and used.
Do you have a static light in place?
Oh… yes, I was working with Skeletal Meshes.
By the way, what do you mean by the 10001 setting you mentioned? I’m still very new to Unreal Engine terminology.
Thank you very much for your explanation.
Nothing specific, its just that lighting - particularly dynamic - on a skeletal mesh or anything deformed requires very specific settings to be toggled on and off based on what you need.
As well as properly written shaders.
For instance, most normal maps applied will cause seams on the mesh if you do not recalculate tangents on the material.
Also, in my experience using static lights doesn’t work for gameplay or with Grooms. So if you plan on using those you may want to check on what things look like before dumpting time and money on trying to get all the settings right…
Another pitfall is that cloth if animated may also require tangent recalculation.
There’s also the fact that SSR and SSS work differently on skeletal that on static.
Sub surf scattering doesn’t even seem to work correctly, ignoring custom maps in lieu of distance between vertex. Or shutting off when the map reaches a value of .1 or so.
And its something you may want to try first since effects usually get built on top of it.
Aha… That was a lot harder than I first thought.
I’m going to go back to the project and give it another try.
Thanks so much for the detailed explanation.
Its not an easy thing to calculate shading on simething that can change mid frame - but in my honest opinion its still one of the absolute worse things in engine.
You can definitely make it work, but you need a degree in Epic Developer Brain Surjery…
It is supported (although not recommended by epic for cost reasons). This post shows the required steps to get it working if your project calls for it.
In epic speak that means “turn this on, but keep a fire extinguisher on hand”… I’d be careful with it 