I’ve had this continous issue with lighting in unreal even dating back from when I used unreal 4, now I’m on Unreal 5.21 with a new project and I still can’t get the light to behave normally.
I’m trying to manipulate the directional lights to create a day cycle but it only seems to have an effect on the skybox and not the actual objects themselves.
To my knowledge I have not touched any delicate settings regarding lighting or rendering whatsoever yet it persists.
Facing ‘away’ just means it’s facing everting from one side, so everything will still be lit.
The directional light is not like a spot, you can’t face in direction X, and there is no light in direction -X. Facing it direction X, will mean that the shadows will be on the opposite side of all the objects. That’s all.
I’m not talking about moving it around and making it face certain places, from my understanding I can observe that it kind of behaves like the sun of a skybox(?).
If I were to rotate the direction the light is facing it should theoretically cast light and shadows on objects of the scene, yet it’s not doing that. In my instance to face upwards rather than downwards onto the scene.
After experimenting I saw that it behaved the way in which I expected it to in the first person template
The effect I want to achieve, the main directional light facing towards a positive 90 degree in the y
axis, with a second and much weaker one, simulating a moonlight angled at -90 degrees in the y axis.
This seems to only work in the first person template and not when I create other scenes, am I wrong in assuming that this should be a default function when creating a new scene in unreal?
I’ve made some advancements and temporary fixes that tend this issue:
After copying the light assets/components from the First Person Template level, I can at least get the level in scene view to behave the way it should.
However there’s still this unusual effect that affects the lighting of the materials STILL when I load into game mode.
Basically; it depends on how the lighting is angled when the level is loaded. If the directional light is pointed at the surface when the level is loaded, all the objects’ surfaces’ will retain that brightness even the light goes down, similar to the image that I posted in the OP.
However if I hide it in the scene view, it definitely shows shadows and retains that darkness when loaded into the level, even lighting up appropriately as intended and darkening again when the light goes up and down.
I see. But you can, at least, confirm if it’s a bug of your Unreal version.
If it’s mandatory to use a buggy version of a software (doesn’t seem too logic), you have two options: force the whole team to upgrade (very recommended in the certain case of previous Unreal versions), or find the way to implement the more recent bug fix in your older version.
However back when I did try changing the scalability I had received a suggestion to try and turn off eye adaptation in the post processing, that makes the scene look a little darker? But I’m not sure if this only applies to the scene or the player camera itself.
In another scene it would load the darkness with a dim light but it just grew more visible within seconds into the game mode.
