The great things about Emissive materials is they contribute to offscreen GI with no cost due the how Lumen was designed.
But emissives have big, unacceptable visual issues when an object is is small and/or very bright.
There’s some work arounds by using massive and/or dim objects that contribute lighting and are check off to not be visible to the camera.
But these “fixes” are limited to HWRT lumen(So, bye bye 60fps on target hardware)
or still show the emissive in reflections which is unacceptable for many possible projects.
TLDR:
But imagine a scalable actor in the style of a reflection capture or volume box that intercepts the lighting scene the way emissive objects do but have no reflection information?
The actor could be introduced easily in the common actors and could be dragged and dropped like a volume with the following public variables:
Size, position, and transform.
Float: Brightness Intensity. (Allow same range as Emissive materials)
3 Vectors: Base Color.
Boolean: Contribute to Lumen lighting scene?
Boolean: Enabled screen Traces?
And whatever other standard variables the Epic team would consider essential to common UE game development workflow.
This could be a great addition to many projects. I ask the Lumen Dev team to consider an algorithm for this Actor concept that would fit Lumens design. I am not an Engine Dev and I do not possess the skills to design an actor so close to the source code. If such solution has already been made then I would appreciate a share/link.
I decided to add this to the UEFN since this could also benefit creators who want to utilize this concept as they do not have access to blueprints. Fortnite’s improvement and success is important to many non-FN developers since that game funds UE great leaps in technology for us.