Is it advisable to work with physically accurate lighting ranges?

[Arkiras]

Not sure what happened to applying pre-exposure, but you can still use realistic lighting values by enabling Extend Default Luminance Range… unfortunately for whatever reason this was removed as a project setting, though it is still available via command and ini.

If you are using Lumen I would not recommend using realistic sunlight values, as it has a bunch of issues that I wasn’t able to resolve. You can read about them here:

Lumen GI and Reflections feedback thread

Bloom explodes when using realistic sunlight intensity values for directional lights in Lumen. In this example I used 75k, because that’s what the SunSky actor is set to in the plugin that is bundled with Unreal. [Bloom issue with realistic sunlight intensity] This appears to be specific to Lumen, as I tested the same scene with baked lighting via GPU/CPU Lightmass with normal results: [UE5_LumenVsBloom] In the Lumen map, all lights are moveable. Lumen final gather set to 2. In…

Lumen GI and Reflections feedback thread

Another issue I encountered with more realistic sunlight intensity: The probe grid(? voxels? idk) becomes very visible when using high values. [UE5_LumenRealisticSunlight_Squares]

Lumen GI and Reflections feedback thread

The light complexity viewmode also blows up when using high intensity directional lights, the VS/PS instructions go through the roof. But I think this is just erroneous output on the visualizers part, as this extreme increase in complexity seems to have no impact at all on the performance of the game. [UE5_LumenLightComplexityView] Won’t help in this case, as these are indirect shadows.