Hello everyone,
I have this problem where any cube in my world has a completely black bottom face. Only once I rotate it a little bit does the face with its color become visible.
This is my current lighting setup in the world:
Does anybody know what could cause this problem and how I might be able to fix this?
Sky atmos?
I added one into my map and although I do see some difference on the rotated cubes, the bottom side of the center ones is unfortunately still very dark.
Do I need to change any values in the Sky Atmosphere in particular? Something like scatter distance so that more light rays reach the bottom face of my cube?
Are skylights still a thing? Those are the ones that are usually used to soften shadows. Or at least they were a while back. I haven’t made a huge outdoors level in a while.
I think it was indirect lighting bounces or some other number in the skylight that softens shadows.
Edit: I’m blind, you have one in your OP picture! Anyway, I recommend messing with the settings in the skylight then.
Ah, worth a shot. It would have worked by default.
I tried ramping up the following settings individually in the SkyLight to see if one of them solved my problem, but unfortunately none of them did:
None of these changes had any visible effect at all.
Interestingly, when I increase the “Intensity Scale” so that everything is completely oversaturated (to 10000), the only thing that is not totally lit are the two bottom faces:
Unreal really just refuses to light these face when they are completely or nearly level with the ground axes and it is really annoying…
Also if anyone wants to reproduce this, for me I get the same result everytime:
So every default basic level has the lighting setup that acts weird on a cube…
Followed your instructions
There is a bug sneaking around here to so with bounced lighting. I’ve seen it on macs. Are you using a mac?
No I am on Windows 11 with the latest Unreal version 5.1.1 (although version 5.1 produced the same bug).
I have it with strange shaped play areas ( like walkable spheres ), there’s some kind of short cut happening with the skylight or bounces there.
But flat new level, no problem.
What about in a totally new project?
I tried a completely new project based on the Blank template and it worked! But the problem is I am working with VR so my current project where the bug occurred is based on the VR template.
If I start a new project from the VR template then the bug still occurs so it does seem like the problem is somehow related to the VR template.
What are my options now? I really do not want to move everything to a blank project because I already invested a lot of work and moving this stuff will take me forever…
Ah, it could be related to VR, I guess. Bounced lighting is expensive to compute, so maybe it’s disabled in VR ( I’m gonna try now ) ( 5 thousand shaders later… )
By default, it doesn’t work.
But, on the skylight,
I suspect the fog could do with tweaking as well, looking at that black line on the horizon. It’s definitely configured differently to a normal project.
Yes, you need to change the fog inscattering color to remove the black horizon.
To be clear, this still isn’t bounced light, but it’s better… 
You sir are my saviour!
Perfectly lit cube:
Question solved thx to @ClockworkOcean
For anyone reading this:
Ha! 
