i know that the way lightning works in UE4-5 is completely different as how those engines handle light, but is there a way to maybe lower the resolution of the shadows?
I’ve managed to get pretty basic late 90s/early 2000s-looking lighting in my game with custom gouraud (vertex-interpolated) shading, may or may not be relevant for you, but that’s a big part of the graphics from that era. There’s no realtime shadows in my setup and it doesn’t support actual UE lights since everything’s faked in the material, so it may or may not be what you’re looking for.
Unreal’s pretty difficult to work with if you want to get custom lighting so in my case I just made my own light actors that affect my gouraud materials through a material parameter collection (as a result it only supports 64 active lights at a time though). If you want actual proper lighting with customized shadows and everything, you’d probably have to look into a custom shader model. I saw this plugin a while back while researching for my project, looks like it could maybe be used to get actual custom lighting working. It doesn’t look like the creator’s been responding to any questions recently though and emailing him just gives an automated response saying his inbox is full, so I wasn’t able to get too much info on that.
And I’ll just copy/paste some info I gave on a Discord server about my setup a while back if you’re curious:
I made a bunch of custom materials to try and recreate that [PS2-style rendering limitations] without using any default lighting or PBR stuff. The biggest parts are probably the lighting and reflections. For the lighting I’m just using a really basic implementation of the Gouraud shading model (vertex brightness is based on whether or not it’s facing a light, and the distance between it and the light source). For reflections, I’m just using a basic, vertex-interpolated version of the Blinn-Phong reflection model, which basically just makes the vertices of a shiny materials glow a little if they’re facing both a light source and the player’s camera. I have next to no idea what I’m doing when it comes to more complicated graphics stuff like that tbh lol, but it wasn’t too hard to get working with a fair bit of googling though thankfully.
Good luck!
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