I’m working on a space station setting, where we’re using Post Processing to give a low-poly/pixilated look. I’m trying to avoid using Lumen to save on performance, but for the life of me, I just can’t seem to get the lighting right. My lights are fairly simple. They’re stationary and can be turned off and on via a light switch (that all works just fine). The issue is that it just looks really bad. There was artifacting in the shadows at one point, so I turned that off, tried lowering the attenuation radius because they were overlapping and causing errors, but now the light is hyper-focused and doesn’t spread the way I want it (in the screenshot, you can see the ceilings are pitch black). I’ve watched I don’t know how many tutorials on lighting, but they are all focused on high fidelity lighting, and I’m going more for a lethal company vibe, but with a slightly higher focus on light being important.
If anyone has any tips on what I should be doing, settings, light types, or a video that covers this that I just haven’t run across yet, I’d be very grateful.
I took a deep dive on lighting recently. If you’re using the old pipeline, there’s a few things to consider. Have you turned off Virtual Shadow Maps? Or rather, make sure that it’s set to “Shadow Maps”.
If you’re using Rect Lights, these are actually quite expensive in my personal experience. It’s possible it works fine in your project though. Thing is rect lights are one sided. They won’t illuminate the ceiling unless you have a lot of indirect lighting.
Next, if you’re going to turn the light on/off, you’re likely gonna have to set your light to movable. Stationary lights can change colors and be dimmed. So if you want to turn it off, try setting the intensity to 0 instead of turning it off with visibility or other method. This will let you keep your light as stationary.
For indirect lighting (secondary bounces), you need to enable a pipeline. You can use Screen Space GI. This is set in the Post Process Volume. This is if you want movable actors to be affected by your lights. But for mesh actors that are static like your walls, this is handled by their shadow maps and you need to bake your lighting. Your walls need to be set to static or stationary.
Baking lights can look way better than Lumen because it’s not limited by CPU/GPU time. So not sure what’s going with your scene. It looks like there’s zero global illumination. Make sure your walls don’t have tiny lightmap resolutions. Also, make sure you create lightmap UV’s for all your static meshes (like your walls). The source UV index should be 0 and the destination UV index should be 1.
Try going through this list. If it’s still bad, then I don’t know. I’ll have to see what else could be causing this.
A couple more tips. If you’re baking lights and set your walls to static (or stationary), add a LightmassImportanceVolume to your scene and make sure it surrounds all your lighted areas.
And yeah, I had a level with rect lights. I had to replace them with spotlights. For your project, you’re probably better off using a point light and setting your light fixture with an emissive material that doesn’t cast a shadow. This means your light fixture will be illuminated but won’t waste cpu/gpu time casting shadows. You have more control with an actual light. I’ve not had much luck using an emissive as a light source. For glow effects and global illumination effects, sure. But light up a room, no.
Also, if you have a directional light, it may have an effect even though it’s outside. Try turning it off for testing. Usually it’s fine, but if you do have issues it’s almost impossible to find if you don’t know about it.
If you need help with reflections, I can help you out. You actually have better tools using the old pipeline for reflections than in Lumen. You have planar reflections if you want mirror like reflections. They work with everything including Niagara (Lumen reflections don’t work with niagara effects at all). The planar reflections are costly as they rerender the scene, but you can pick which actors to rerender, so it can actually be cheap. If you have things above 0.2 roughness that you just want some kind of reflections where you can’t make out the exact details of what is being reflected, use sherical reflection captures. They’re free and you can put in as many as you’d like.
