I’m trying to make a very simple thing work in my project: emissive materials.
I’ve started a new project at 4.24 ue using the sample project (product design) that has a car.
When I create the emissive material, it works in material preview but when I apply in my simple mesh it turns grey.
I’ve tried everything like bloom, mobile hdr, removed the post-proccessing, and so on without success.
When I go to material preview with my cam zoom in preview sphere (the emissive not works):
The first issue, where you zoom in in the editor and the light becomes dim, is expected. That is the auto exposure adjusting the entire scene lighting in the same way that your eyes adjust when leaving a dark interior space. The second issue is unexpected, it looks like the emmissive value is simply zero, even though your material is properly set up. Does the appearance change at all if you make your emmissive color non-white? Red for example. The only other thing that comes to mind is to check if the usage flags for the material include static meshes. This is in the materials details panel in the material editor. It is normally set automatically, but its the closes thing that comes to mind.
I’ve created a new blank third person template and created a emissive material there.
I’ve checked all configs in materials, post processing, rendering (project options) to be the same. But in my project it still not doing emissive materials…
The fact that it is at least partially red in your viewport means that the material did compile, and there is some portion of the pipeline working. If this isn’t a bug, then the most likely possibility is that everything around the emmissive sphere is already so bright that the sphere looks dim by comparison. Again, that would be an exposure problem.
Here’s what I would try next:
If all you want is that bright glow, change the material’s shading model from default Lit to Unlit. This won’t solve your issue, but it will make the result more obvious when you do.
In your post process volume, find and enable the exposure settings “Min Brightness” and “Max Brightness”. Set both of them to 1.0. Also ensure your post process volume is the only one in the scene and has “Infinite Bounds” enabled. This will turn off auto-exposure and we can say for certain whether or not it is the rest of the scene is causing the issue. If the whole screen becomes nearly white and super blown out, then your emmissive material needs a much higher multiplier, or you need to tone down the brightness of all of your lights and potentially remake lighting.
