Change lightmood with materials

Hey everyone

I was searching the forums for a few days about my problem but couldn’t find anything that was exactly about what I want. So here it goes:

I have an ArchViz house where I can move around and change materials (of the floor for instance). Now if i change the floor material let’s say from a dark wood to a light concrete, in real life the whole atmosphere of the light in the whole room would change. Atm It just changes the reflections of the floor an so on, but not the lightcolor on the walls for instance. Now I know that the light is baked into the wall, but is there maybe any way I can change the color at real time? I’ve thought about the refl. captures but they don’t support update at runtime. Recapturing the sky sphere also doesn’t do any changes.

My next thing to try would be to actually switch level when you change the material. But I assume this would result in way too many levels and a huge dataload on the project. Maybe someone knows a solution to my problem?

Of course, the effect is already cool as it is, but coming from ArchViz I know how much a materialchange can affect the general ambiance… so it bugs me ^^

Cheers

The console command r.ReflectionCapture is supposed to update reflection captures even during runtime, might be worth trying.

Still wouldn’t change bounce colors. But, you could try baking the lighting with an averaged color of the different materials, so it wouldn’t be as obvious.

The super fake way to do it would be to update move-able lights with the average color of the material. Requires it to be setup and tweaked by hand, but if there’s one central thing, like a feature wall, bouncing a bunch of colored light around, it could pass as acceptable. I’ve done it with flashlights to add fake GI.

You could use lighting scenarios in combination with swapping out a bunch of materials at the same time. It would be too much work for individual materials on individual objects. You would need to have color schemes.

The bad news is that reflection is broken since 4.18 for lighting scenarios so you need to go back to 4.16/17 or wait for 4.19

Thanks for the replies. I will have a look at both suggestions and see what works best. For now I will leave it as it is as this is only a prototype to demonstrate what’s possible. Really hope they fix the scenario issue in the next version!

@ZacD: good to know that there is a way to update the reflections, especially if you have very reflective objects in the scene (I’ve decided not to use mirrors for the moment, but that might make it possible). The solution with the movable lights seems like a good solution for scenes with mostly artificial lights.

I got into Lighting scenarios at 4.18. I noticed that reflections didn’t update if they are in the persistent level. But if the reflection capture is put together with the scenario i believe it should be fine.

It works fine in the editor but not in a stand alone game. I think I tried your approach. Epic confirmed that it is broken but has been fixed for 4.19.

+1 on this. Also, Parunkel, could you share how you tackled the changing of the floor material? Seems like this should be relatively simple but all of the methods I can find around, seem kinda complicated. Complicated for a novice like me I mean. :]