Hi, i have a problem atm. Is there a solution to hide/disable the “glowing spot” in reflections from a light source? Or maybe another way to have a light like the directional light without a visible “source” of the light in the reflections?
I have a black wall which is like a black mirror (just 0,0,0 as base color and 0 roughness). I know you can set the min. roughness higher to get a more diffuse effect, but that don’t work in my case. When i set the min. roughness of the light higher the wall becomes grey.
This is a function of the Physical-Based Materials. What is happening when you increase the roughness is actually spreading that light across your surface as would happen in the real world with lighting. Ultimately though there is no way with a directional light to remove the source rendering, you can help reduce the blooming effect by adding a global post process volume (unbound) and lowering the bloom setting.
Yes you can remove the light source reflecting from a directional light if you:
Click to select the light.
Then find “specular scale” in its details panel and set it to zero.
Also note that in the current documentation for directional lights it says “min roughness”
I am in Unreal 4.22.3 and I think they changed it to “specular scale”. Looks like they haven’t
updated the documentation yet.
I think it is very useful to think of it like lighting on a movie set. In real life, we can not eliminate specular highlights, so it might be cooler to place also virtual rect light sources in a way that they are not particularly obvious/apparent if we don’t want them to show inside certain objects reflections (depending what one is after, art style wise, of course).
In a PBR context, removing the specular completely robs the lights a lot of their impact and their help to further emphasize form, I can see that now after trying it out. I think on a real set, those also would absolutely show up in the chrome ball. But it is ok. Because it is ultimately about what the viewer notices. If we would kill every single fill light’s specular influence on a set, we would never have those infamous eye reflections that make characters seem alive. None of the muscular form depictions of superheroes, etc.
I was becoming hesitant to use area lights despite them actually enhancing the scene, because they did show up in my calibration sphere’s chrome ball and that made me panic, as it is often tought in real time and esp. game lighting to keep your reflections clean. So I was looking for a way to exclude them from reflections, because I thought that def. can not be that way. Then I landed at this post.
But after researching and learning more about film lighting, especially practical vs. movie lighting, and the combo of both, I start to realize that there is more to it than just using practical lights.
This is especially true with now having the ability to utilize MegaLights! Because we do not have to restrict ourselves too much anymore in the way we light. Which is absolutely amazing.
Of course, the ability to have specular-less fill lights is still a very interesting and useful option to have in your tool belt. In cases where you do actually want to reduce specularity, but still want to fill something with light. (I bet film makers would kill for that ability for some of their use cases instead of using tricks like makeup etc.)
instead of using tricks like makeup etc.)