I’m working on a simple gallery space - like a 8 room “maze” to help create a learning place for UE at work. I’m learning all this on my own in the hopes we can implement UE more into our workflow.
Anyway - I’ve read up on Lumen Settings and Post Process Volume Tweaking but I just can’t get the emissive to stick when I move away from the surface. I come from Lumion/Twinmotion/Enscape, so I’m familiar with the meshes not actually casting light, and it’s up to Lumen to infill in the place of real lights. I’m used to placing light objects so that’s what I’ve been doing. Probably not the best workflow, but I’ve been importing DataSmith files from SketchUp since that’s my normal 3D platform.
But I have a circular table with a cove around the bottom, and I’ve tried Point and Rect lights, but can’t seem to get the glow shape to look right. I saw something about changing the source radius of a rect light, but that seems incorrect and I can’t find a radius setting on the Rect Light other than Attenuation.
Attaching a Screenshot to show what I mean. Appreciate any tips! Thanks,
Ah yep - thanks. It does glow a little better, but still fades when I’m far away. I read about changing the Lumen settings in the post process volume, but it doesn’t seem to be doing anything - even when everything’s set to max values.
Is that just because the mesh is too small? or should I rework my emissive/exposure settings so that it’s a more powerful level? I have a ton of coves in this project
the table uses an emissive material? it’ll fade when it gets too small for lumen to compute it. that is correct. scene detail usually fixes that, but i becomes a performance hog.
i’m thinking if you could maybe fake the glow cramming a spot light with a wide angle into the table and make the bottom bit a material that doesn’t cast shadows for that light to pass thru. or use light channels or something to avoid the shadow cast.
Yes - basically it’s an L Shape that’s revolved around the base. The bottom facing side is painted in SketchUp to be different so that I can make it emissive - meaning there’s 2 materials on that mesh. I’m new to this so I don’t know yet if that’s a bad practice in UE lol
I’ll try the point light option and see if I can tweak the angle and source radius to get light on the vertical face below the emissive too. This is probably being overly picky so I’ll take what I can get and see what it looks like when I add more rooms/materials and such.
spot light gives you maybe better control. inner and outer cone fade radius. point light has only light distance.
for the vertical faces you could use vertex color or a vertex color channel to pass an “emissive” value. to make the material “full bright” albedo to fake lighting it. ton of visual cheats to apply there. ; )
