Lighting workflow questions

This may be the skylight, which add overal light to the scene. It may also be a post process volume, which some people use to fix the brightness of scene at a known value before using point lights etc.

There’s no global off switch for emissives.

Did you remove the PP?

I’m fairly new to Unreal and I’m trying to learn about lighting. I’ve got a Sci-Fi hallway scene that I got from the marketplace and its a great reference. What I’d like to know is if it’s possible to isolate or solo lights so I can see just their influence in the scene? I couldn’t find anything in the documentation lighting pages. If there’s not a way to isolate lights, is there a way to temporarily turn off a bunch without having to change the value of every light by hand (there are a lot of them!)? How do you normally deal with this?

Thanks!

I have turned off the visibility of the lights and it does look like that has an effect, but even with all the lights turned off (and rebuild the lighting and reflection captures) I’m still seeing lots of light in the scene.

I did just turn on the show-visualize-volumetric light map and the spheres seem lit up. Trying to figure out how to rebuild that with the lights turned off.

I don’t think its the skylight I’ve turned off everything but the static meshes. It would also be helpful to know if there’s a way to globally disable emissive surfaces instead of changing each material.

Sorry, not sure what the PP is. Still very new to this. :slight_smile:

Look in the world outliner ( the list of things in the level ), do you see post processing volume in there. If you do, remove it, and you’ll probably see a difference.

I just found this plugin, may be worth to take a look : Light Explorer in Code Plugins - UE Marketplace

Thanks, I’ll check it out!

Which market asset is it? Maybe I have it…

This one ? Light Explorer in Code Plugins - UE Marketplace (I’m not sure the question was adressed to me :slight_smile: )

No, sorry, I meant sci-fi market asset ( OP ). :slight_smile:

Its a free one called “Scifi Hallway” Lots of red, white, and chrome. Made by Epic.
I’m starting to think its some kind of cached thing that I can’t seem to get rid of.

I’ll take a look

Workflow wise, I found something that works well enough for me now. Most of the example scenes I’ve seen have had everything under a single top node. I’ve gone through and put stuff in different folders to organize it better. With the lights, I’ve grouped them into folders by their type and if the are somehow otherwise the similar in some way. Makes it easier for me to turn on and off groups of lights so I can see what they’re doing. I just need to understand how to remove whatever cached volume(?) lighting is going on so I can actually get back to pitch black and start from scratch.

Just curious, does most of the games industry work this way with a flat organization and every light just called point1-point297? That seems like a REALLY difficult way to work.

So, select all the light and bin them. It will whine about the sky, but don’t worry for now.

Then you have to rebuild the lighting. Then you have total darkness apart from emissive matertials. You can’t turn them off.

So toggling the eye icon doesn’t work for turning them off? Even if I rebake it with them disabled?

Nope. The eye icon is an editor convienience, when you bake or play everything comes back into view.

If you want to be able to fiddle with lights and see what happens, select all the lights, make them dynamic ( moveable ) and then rebuild.

It looks a bit different, you can’t avoid that. There are reasons for using static lighting. But now at least you can fiddle with the lights and see what happens.

Thanks for the help. I’m really surprised there’s no mute option…