Flickering Lighting

Development Rendering
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Hello,

I’ve been trying to learn Unreal Lighting.

I think I have some of the basics down, but of course I’m no expert.

I’m trying to create a space ship fighting game. Naturally I’m trying to develop lighting that works in large open areas. With strong directional lighting coming from the nearby star, as well as an ambient sky light to offer light visual assistance in dark areas.

However, I’ve been struggling to fix this flickering issue that appears to be on the dark side. It’s a little hard to explain. But essentially it looks like there is a static screen (think like an old CRT tv) from the lighting.

I’ve included two images to show it shifts around, and it does this while in the editor as well. The image doesn’t really do it justice, as it’s very obvious it happens. This is a very basic scene with a bunch of white shapes.

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I’ve tried many things, but I’ve only recently been looking into this again after putting it down for a while.

  • Adjusting the exposure and making it darker fixes the issue entirely, but it’s not playable, too dark.
  • Increasing the Final Gather Quality helps to an extent, but has performance concerns, and it doesn’t fix the issue entirely.
  • Less reflective/rough textures appear to have less of this issue going on.
  • Disabled/Tweaked intensity settings for the lights, both cause the issue.

It leads me to believe there’s something wrong I’m missing here.

Any thoughts appreciated.

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Hey @TheGoldenApe !

Try disabling Lumen first and foremost! Then check your AA settings, try out the different options between FXAA, MXAA, etc, and get back to us! :slight_smile:

2 Likes
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Thanks for the response!

You were right, turning Lumen off does fix it.

I just figured if Lumen was supposed to be powerful I should be using it, but maybe not true. Perhaps I need to learn more about it to understand why that happens.

With the default lighting, it appears like it’s too sudden, for lack of better words.

I assume I just need to toy with post processing/lighting settings some more?

This is just a simple model I made in Blender, I suppose it looks correct based on the model, but I just feel like it looks rough.

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Been doing some testing, appears that turning global illumination to low fixes a large majority of the issues.

Still present, and lighting looks rough but I suppose progress.

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I suspect you’re talking about the harsh shadows? That’s to be expected if you have no atmosphere. Scattering etc is how you end up with more gradient shadows, HOWEVER in outer space realistic=HARD shadows, if you want it to be more gradual look into volumetric fog and scattering! :slight_smile:

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You rock, thanks for the advice.

I think you’re right, true realism would involve a lot of harder shadows.

But I don’t know if I think that makes sense for the type of gameplay I’m going for.

I definitely want players to be able to see, even in dark areas, I’ll give it a go and experiment, will see what I can achieve.

1 Like