Beginner here, I made a simple sphere (my sun) that has a large emissive color and i want it to light up all the planets that will be orbiting around it but as seen in the picture, the sun emits a small orange light.
I have been reading through forum posts and documentations but cant find a way to make it super bright.
First check that the object you have applied the material to is enabled as an emissive light source .
Second in your material put in a parameter that allows you to multiply the the emissive strength
Though for the end solution faking it may work better - have a glowing sun then place a separate flat panel light in next to each planet as if the light was coming from the sun as the real sun is realy realy bright and you probably carn’t crank things up hot enough to get the effect you want.
Don’t use emissive as your main light source, just place a light where the “Sun” is located and use that light instead.
ok, so I was actually kinda wrong because the light reaches the planet but as seen in the picture below it is an orange glow that changes the appearance of the planets (makes a blue planet yellow for instance)
so I guess what I want is the orange glow from the sun to not emit on the planet but a white light. I tried the fake light idea but I don’t know how you can make it brighter:
You should use a rectangular light (Rect Lights | Unreal Engine Documentation)
Change the size to be bigger than the planet - that will create the “flat” effect you want then increase the brightness - the option on the light is called Intensity
The rect light creates the thing I wanted but is there any way I could change the rect light radius in blueprint?
My game spawn planets with random scales so the rect light radius is in the wrong size when spawing the planets
The easiest thing to do is to add the light to your planet Actor as a component attached under the planet’s sphere as that way the light will scale automatically as a child of the sphere. You might however want to think about adding a function to the planet actor call set size which would change the scale of the planet and make adjustments to the light’s size as simply scaling the light might not get you the effect you want.
