Broken Lighting in Blueprints?

[iiMStevo]

I’m really new to Unreal engine, and I’m making a Space-themed turn-based strategy game.
In terms of Logic, I can program pretty well… but when it comes to the creative art side, I’m lost.

I’ve created a Blueprint Actor that randomly generates 1-3 stars, with 0-3 planets that orbit around them, with 0-2 moons that orbit around them.
The stars have emissive materials, which tends to impact light, so I’ve stripped Lumen out and a bunch of other more advanced lighting effects because I don’t want them.

The Blueprint has a point light component added to it, nested under the 1st star in the blueprint, and it’s central to the system.

Now, for the first instance of that blueprint being spawned, the lighting looks great:

However, every other “system” that is spawned, has bugged lighting with no light reaching the planets or moons:

If I adjust the lighting in the blueprint to have a higher attenuation, the planets are eventually lit, but from the central system only (not the system the planet is a part of).

I genuinely can’t wrap my head around this… why is it seemingly not spawning a light as part of a blueprint, or ignoring all light generated from it to only have the one original blueprint light as a source?

[sarahlenker]

Hi @iiMStevo!

Unfortunately, this is one of those problems where having the ability to poke around would likely be best. However, we can try to narrow down the cause. First, we should see if the lights are being spawned at all. Go to your Light Complexity view mode.

This view mode will display the complexity of scene lighting by giving each light’s attenuation radius a color value. Can you send a screenshot of this view? This will help us identify where the existing lights are and their size

[iiMStevo]

Hi,

I don’t have that option when the level is running. The level builds based on the randomisation that occurs in the blueprints to decide the positioning, object count, type of star etc…

While the simulation is running, I can see all the hex tiles are created with the customised lighting based on the stars:

(This obviously changes each time I click the play button)

The moment I try and change anything in that light mixer, it seems to crash out the blueprints as all of the hex tiles are then deleted.

[CatBiteStudios (The Bitey Cat)]

Did you use F8 to pop out of the game? Once you do that, the menus for the visualizations should be available.

[iiMStevo]

Thanks - I didn’t know this!

[iiMStevo]

It looks like, for whatever reason, all of the lights are moving to the default centre:

I have no idea why since they get the world position of the “star” they’re associated with and move to that location… so there’s something screwy going wrong here, but this at the very least gives me a starting point to try figure out why it isn’t going to the world position of the star.

Thank you.

[iiMStevo]

I’ve added a relocation function to the event tick node in the blueprint.
It appears in construction, it’s constructed at 0,0,0 so the world position of the star is basically that with a bit of offset when the light is first relocated.

Putting the function under event tick takes into consideration the orbit of the star and thus corrects the light:

Thank you, everyone