How do I make my lighting look less atrocious?

[EnragedRavioli (Bea)]

Thank you for your response and for the in-depth explanation! I truly appreciate it!

That jittering initially looks to me like screen-space artifacts. Would you try r.Lumen.Reflections.ScreenTraces 0 and r.Lumen.ScreenProbeGather.ScreenTraces 0, to remove screen-space lighting and see what the lumen scene alone is telling you?

This is what my scene looks like with this viewmode at the moment:

There is indeed a ton of pink on my tree meshes.

@jblackwell

I also just watched your video: you had it set to medium scalability, and lumen just flat-out won’t run on medium. High is the minimum, and that’s mainly targeting open-worlds. Epic settings is what it takes to get genuinely high-quality GI.

Furthermore, your trees don’t appear to be nanite. While I couldn’t speak to their construction, lumen and nanite are pretty much joined at the hip as far as performance is concerned. Nanite allows for the fast construction of the surface cache, and without it I wouldn’t be suprised that lumen is behaving poorly.

Here are my current engine scalability settings:

I set some to medium to try and balance out my fps while working on my environment while still having lighting that reliably represents what the final product should look like.

Also, I believe all of my meshes do have Nanite enabled (unless I’m doing something wrong). If it did seem like they were not enabled on the video it might have been because I was toggling nanite off and on while trying to identify the problem, but I did end up enabling it on all my scene’s components once I realised it was not the problem.