Flickering issue when render with Lumen and Movie render queue

Hello! I’m having an issue with my lighting when rendering. My scene consists of emissive lights (which I hear are problematic in lumen) and normal lights. I’m rendering with Lumen, no raytracing, virtual shadow maps. I’m still very new to Unreal Engine, please be gentle :smiley:

Everything looks fine in the viewport, but as soon as I render with Movie queue render, I have issues with flickering lights in normal lights and emissive lights (all the little pink lamps). I tried so many different things and the only thing that is fixing the issue is using the following console variables: r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.ScreenTraces 0 and r.Lumen.Reflections.ScreenTraces 0. This seems to stabilize the reflections and emissive lights.

HOWEVER, this creates a new problem: it makes my shadows look really blotchy, dark and flickery, so it’s unusable. I’ve tried so many different settings but nothing seems to work I included 2 youtube links showing the issues. One is showing the flickering on the tree (the leaves are a transparent material) and emissive lights, the other one is the blotchy shadows I get when I use the cVars. I’ve also included my post process and render settings. I’m using virtual shadow maps for shadows, as my graphic card is really old (gtx 1070) and cannot do raytracing.
Things I’ve tried so far:

-1-64 AA, antialiasing set to none

-Putting the final gather quality to 20

-Remove cast shadows from emissive lights

-Check distance field shadows on all lights

-Try different AA methods, FXAA and TAA

-r.Cache.Lighting.CacheDimension 128

-Upping the AA samples to ridiculous amounts, still flickering

-Render in 4k, 16-8 samples, no change

-Reduce emissive values. It does make the flickering less apparent, but it’s still there

-Changing the camera movement. This fixes the flickering light issue near the tree, however I still have a lot of flickering in the emissive lights.

-Changing the emissive material blend mode to transparent. Since this removes the indirect lighting coming from the pink lamps, it removes the flickering from the emissive lights.

Light flicker issue:

https://youtu.be/njfJ3lko9g8

Shadow issue:

https://youtu.be/KkWN1PwIvkQ

I don’t mind longer render times, as long as it fixes my issue :smiley:

Thanks for your help in advance !

2 Likes

I have the same issue. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to resolve it yet, so I’m looking for a solution here.

Try this
r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.Temporal.MaxFramesAccumulated 32
r.LumenScene.Radiosity.Temporal.MaxFramesAccumulated 12
(High values reduces lumen shadow flickering and fireflys)

This looks like a culling or LOD issue. You can try and toggle these cvars to see if that’s the issue.

foliage.DisableCull
foliage.ForceLOD

If you are using RT shadows or RT Lumen you can try these as well:
r.RayTracing.Culling
r.RayTracing.Geometry.InstancedStaticMeshes.Culling

Disabling RT culling is a pretty big hammer to swing. So you should see if that fixes the issue. If it does I would flip it back on and then go back and set the correct different culling radius cvars.