Does Lumen not work with skeletal meshes?

Im importing a rigged model from maya, but when I drop the skeletal mesh into my level, its really dark and only getting lit from the directional light. I check my Lumen scene visualization, and its not there ie like it doesnt exist.

Im pretty sure the geometrey itself is fine. If i just bring in the meshes and make an actor out of it, it looks perfect. and shows up in the lumen scene.

But when I try to import it as a rigged skeletal mesh, Lumen is not seeing it. Looks terrible.

Is there a step I need to do in order to get skeletal meshes to receive lumen lighting?

maybe your expectation of how lumen works and how it should look is wrong.

skeletal meshes are very much able to receive and cast lumen light. given the proper scenario of incident.

well i have the same overall model side by side in a level. One model is an actor blueprint where I just imported the geometry as static meshes and plopped them in the actor blueprint and then added that to my scene. Looks great. And more importantly, when I turn on Lumen Visualization, I can see its receiving lumen lighting plainly.

On the other one, I imported the model as a skeletal mesh (because it is in fact rigged and skinned to a joint system in maya). I add that skeletal mesh blueprint to the level, and turn on Lumen Visualization in the viewport, and its black. No lumen being computer.

Same materials are applied to both models.

Is there a setting that needs to be applied on import? Or is there something else I might have missed. Im literally just importing the same geo twice, but the skeletal mesh is jacked…

okay. i dunno. i can’t reproduce that behaviour. the default import options should be fine. i dunno if the fbx version matters. latest maya could have issues. the only thing, i figured, that matters after import is that, you gotta save the materials and probably create proper materials or it will not render correctly or other errors might occur.

it is missing entirely in the lumen scene (still receiving lumen light tho) and shadow rays are missing in this case.

no clue what’s wrong on your end. sry :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

Are you using Software RT or Hardware RT? Do you have screen traces disabled? Skeletal Meshes rely heavily on Screen Traces.

Turn on
Use harware for Raytracing in project settings
Post Process → Lumen Reflections-> Turn Ray Lighting mode → Hit Lighting for Reflections.

It worked for me.