In working on a 2D-Orthographic camera view project of my own, I’m experiencing powerful lighting flares from Point lights and Spotlights directed toward the origin (0,0,0) of the level. To illustrate this problem, I recreated the effect in the 2D side-scroller template in two steps:
Change the Background_Sprite material to DefaultLitSpriteMaterial (in order to enable lighting of the background).
Add in point lights to the map, adjusting only their attenuation radius to 10000.
After building the lighting and running the simulation, one can clearly see the visual glare coming from each point light, concentrating on the origin, and increasing in intensity the further away from the origin the lights are placed.
A (low FOV) perspective camera certainly eliminates this issue altogether, however it brings up all of the associated issues of trying to simulate a 2D view in a clearly 3D world. Am I missing a simple fix to materials or lighting, or does anyone know of a workaround to correct this problem?
I have reported this issue for investigation as UE-11446, but it looks like it is an issue with the PBM’s roughness setting not computing correctly in the orthographic camera view. If you take the Default Lit Sprite Material and set the Roughness to 0 (with no input it defaults to 0.5) your Flares should be significantly reduced if not eliminated. And if possible turning off Lens Flare and Bloom can help as well. As soon as we have investigated this issue further though I will report back here.
Thank you for taking notice of this topic, Eric! Work continues on the UE project I am participating in, although we have been doing our best to make a perspective camera work with 2D art. I’m still very interested in a resolution to this issue.
Per your suggestion, I tried manipulating the roughness value in our flooring material. The behavior I observed seemed to act like a focus on the “flare.” 0.5 does indeed appear to be the default roughness value; 0.0 resulted in a sharp line of bright light; high values cause a very diffused looking effect, but the “flare” is still apparent.
I can’t help but feel that this artifact has something to do with the mathematics of lighting through an orthographic viewpoint. Every “flare” converges on the 0,0,0 origin of the world, and their intensity also increases with distance from the origin.
This has to do with the camera’s culling and where the light is in space in relationship to the camera’s frustum. Increasing the attenuation radius is the equivalent to increasing the Scale Bounds of a Mesh. It is a symptom of the same issue we are working to resolve.
I am still experiencing this bug, point lights have flares towards 0.0.0 on materials with specular highlights, in orthographic camera, UE version 4.15.
Was this not resolved yet? Does anyone know a workaround?
Go into Project Settings → “Rendering” and make sure that Forward Shading is enabled. After restarting the editor, i had no more flares or lighting problems.
I love Unreal but it is not made for 2D games. Give yourself a break and check other engines. I am using Unreal for all of my 3D games. But as long as Epic does not improve Paper2D I will go with Unity for my 2D games.
any solutions incoming or is it possible to redraw those reflection like camera was in persp. fov 5 mode?
