Considerations for a game about insects

Hi all,

I’m working on a game about insects - so clearly the size of the world in meters is pretty small (less than two meters in X and Y dimensions). Out of habit I have been dealing with the insects as if they were 1-2 meters in length, keeping everything consistent (and working on the UE4 default basis that 1uu == 1cm).

But now I am starting to worry that from a rendering perspective this is the wrong thing to do. Many objects exist that are huge compared to the ants (take the leaf of a plant for example). For example, its shadow will probably be sharper than it should be, and I’ve been having trouble finding a good SSS setting. I’m sure there are other inaccuracies that would come my way too.

I would like to treat 1uu as 0.01cm. So, I could resize all my assets down to their “real-world size”. But I fear that the tiny-ness of this would make simple tasks like positioning and viewport navigation incredibly troublesome. Really, I think what I need to do instead is tweak some settings in the post-processing and the lightmass control to more realistically reflect the situation.

I’m aware of the following two settings:

  • ‘World to Meters’ in the ‘VR’ section of World Settings: I think this only affects VR though, and I’ve noticed no discernible change to the appearance of anything when I rebuild.
  • ‘Static Lighting Level Scale’ in the Lightmass settings: my gut is telling me that this should be set to 0.01. But the tooltip clearly states that values lower than 1 increase build times greatly, and an attempt has show this to be true. Another part of me wondered if it should be 100… but at this scale I get no shadows at all from the plants (which granted, might be correct.)

Really I’m wondering what the most ‘physically accurate’ settings are in this case: where to set them and what sort of value to set them to.

Many thanks from rainy England