I did a search here but couldn’t find a way to create shadows with custom colors in Unreal. There seems to be a way to do it in Blender and probably in the high end render engines but can it be done in Lumen? Any tips or ideas would be great.
Here’s the way to make colored shadows in Blender for a point of reference.
From my understand, there is no “easy” way of changing the color of shadows without delving into some engine code and tweaking the shaders. You can kind of trick it with various ambient lighting effects, but I would assume that isn’t the effect that you desire.
Hi @Melik1,
While @Only-Preston is correct that the direct effect of coloring shadows is not directly achievable since Unreal prioritizes physically based lighting, there are some visual workarounds that I would like to offer as options.
The first option is to simply adjust the color grading for the shadow range in your postprocess settings. This will not just directly target your shadows unfortunately, but depending on your project this might be good enough.
Another option is to separate out the shadows in a postprocess material. Again, this won’t be entirely accurate, but it will allow you much more control over what receives color. In my example, I’ve used a smoothstep and a multiply to hone in the mask, but you can use other math instead to achieve the exact look you need.
Unfortunately, yeah without modifying engine code this is about as good as you can get.
Good luck. Let me know if you have any other questions.
While I’m afraid I can’t tell you how to do it as I’ve long since forgotten. I know I once achieved this post processing. It is of course not perfect though, as most post processing solutions aren’t.
Many thanks @sarahlenker ! This is a great starting point for me as I’m still new at Unreal shader nodes. It looks promising for the effect I’m looking for; I’ll experiment with these options!
I also saw a vid about “toon shader” looks in Unreal that may give more control over shadow colors but it’s another thing I need to experiment with. Thanks again for the ideas!
@Only-Preston and @RobertoCosta_Dev thanks for the comments. I was researching this topic after I posted the question and found a possible way to do custom color shadows by doing Shadow Catcher/Shadow Pass renders and adjusting isolated colors in an external post/compositor program. I’d prefer to do it in Unreal but I’m okay with doing it outside of Unreal.
