This is really annoying me, spend a lot of time setting up lighting and PP in the desired way and going to 4.9 has changed… something. Here is a comparison.
For the trees you can see the difference in lighting and shadowing underneath the fronds and leaves.
I have trawled through the notes on 4.9, did not find anything obvious. There was the DFAO change, however I tried some cvars to disable the new method and it made no difference to the appearance.
Sometimes there are changes that don’t seem to make it into the notes. I remember working on a scene in 4.4 or one of the earlier builds, and getting a very particular sky. When I upgraded to the next major version, it was a completely different sky. I couldn’t get it back without migrating the old blueprint - even though none of the settings actually changed.
I didn’t use migrate, I opened the project with the newly built 4.9 and used convert in place, not sure if that would achieve different results. Also haven’t noticed any performance difference with this new AO method, don’t know if it is working, though the AO on tree’s and foliage look worse for me, darker.
Might have found half of the problem-- From the notes “Fixed wrong colors and artifacts when using color grading (extreme red in darks or more subtle ones).” I was using color grading, so I lowered my values a little and it got it a bit closer to right. Would be interested to know if there is a value somewhere to offset the changes in the patch.
I used migrate to keep the old sky in the newer version. I was able to select the old blueprint and do so. Unfortunately in your case, I don’t know if a similar approach would be possible. I just used this example to let you know I went through something similar in the past. Have you tried tweaking the settings to get your original look? That was the first thing I attempted.
Aye I have, I have a fairly picky eye with the lighting and color for atmosphere, I have got it -close- but there are some things that look quite off. I think it might have a lot to do with the AO changes, and perhaps minor tweaks to the lights and color grading. It’s a nightmare because trying to get it back to where it is meant to be is a slow process.
On another note, I was using the Kite Demo Basin river mesh and material for a river. Seems that the material used for the riverbed basin M_TilingDisplacementTest_01 won’t render on the riverbed basin mesh. I can put the material on any other mesh and it works just fine, but when I put it on the riverbed basin I get worldgrid? Odd.
Yeah I know what you mean. And now that I’m thinking about it, I did notice more contrast when I recently updated my content packs for 4.9. I had struck a perfect balance with the lighting, and had to do a little tweaking to get it back to where it was before.
That’s strange about the river. Might want to submit that as a bug in answerhub for Epic to check out.
