So, I currently have a scene of a map that has some billboard meshes in the distance with a directional lighting/skylight/sky atmosphere actors in the scene.
These distant meshes always look washed out/blue unless I move the sun to be more in front of the mesh from the perspective of the player camera.
The problem is that I don’t want this effect. I instead just want the mesh to look almost unlit, but take into account that the scene has light and to just lighten/darken based upon that light.
I have tried everything I can think of on why this is happening. I want the mesh/material/texture to kind of ignore directional lighting and render at a brightness based upon the lighting in the scene.
I did try setting the material to unlit and then multiplying the base color by pre-exposure inverse property, and it did work a little but by making the texture not washed out, but then it ignored the directional lightning.
Can someone point to me what I am doing wrong, or am I asking the engine to perform something that just isn’t capable?
I have Exponential Height Fog completely disabled.
Something I noticed that sort of helps is changing this value:
Aerial Perspective View Distance Scale: 1.0 → 0.0
But, its not providing the effect I am looking for as I am still having to apply pre exposure to the material to get the unlit material to look somewhat right.
I am really wanting the material to stay default lit, but don’t apply directional lighting and instead just take generic lighting and apply to this material. That way, when the scene is dawn, the whole material looks like its bathed in dawn, when in midday, it looks like its midday, and then dusk, it looks dusk.
The major problem is that it’s a billboard mesh, so depending on the time of day, it looks correct or not as the mesh is actually catching the directional lighting and other times it doesn’t.
Easy solution to that: put a normal map on it that gives it the normals you need. It will at least catch the lighting correctly and narrow down your possible problems.
