They’re (supposed to be) applied by pressing the “apply changes” button. You might think pressing the save button would apply the settings but you would be wrong. You might also think the apply button would be in the toolbar like every other editor window, but you’d be wrong again because the static mesh editor doesn’t care what is “logical” or “consistent”… so instead there are FOUR different apply buttons in the details panel.
As for whether or not it’s right… well… I don’t know if it’s “right”, but this is how it’s always been.
“By default” suggests there’s a way to reenable it. Is that the case? I’m guessing not.
Maybe it’s true that “most” do but there’s no inherent link between Lumen and Nanite so I’d consider it a bad practice to treat them as if there was. Picking and choosing features like this is what leads to well optimized projects.
Personally it only matters to me right now if the HISMs would save me perf over the ISMs I’m already using. With the Nanite constraint they do not; without it, I don’t know.
Maybe worth mentioning but a little over a month ago I built ue5-main and didn’t see this problem at the time. Though perhaps it was just the test scene I used.
Sparse/Blocky indirect lighting I expected, but is there anything that can be done about the constant flickering and pop-in from fast camera turns/disocclusion?
Also new irradiance cache makes volumetric fog alot stronger. No idea how expected that is. Volumetric fog is the only way i found out to have fog react to autoexposure correctly because in year 2026 we still do not have eyeadaptation in blueprints, nor any eye adaptation settings in heightfog because reasons.
I had quite a fun time doing screenshots for my stuff with the recent UE5.8 preview - Megalights works fast and balance of the quality vs sacrifices is really good (no noise!), sun shadows still fail a lot with those jagged edges (an magic CVar to improve that?), Lumen GI light & reflections on the transparent surfaces are cool, especially at night with 2 bounces/1 refraction. But light leaking through thin objects like doors is still a problem, especially with the area lights (those can leak even through 0.5m walls), and coherency suffers here and there (like ceiling lamps in the window reflections, but maybe those are like that because I tried to use SSS material as an substitute for milky glass, placing area light behind it). Here are the best shots:
Also would be nice to have short range AO extra cvars for power and intensity. Yes I know I can disable short range AO and turn on SSAO for lumen. Or at that stage is it basically the same thing?
There is now an Intensity control for Lumen Short Range AO in the Post Process Settings. We’re hesitant to add more controls - Short Range AO is just there to cover over loss of detail from downsampling GI so heavily, and how much it is doing changes dramatically across the scalability levels from Lumen Medium quality up to Lumen Epic quality, so any stylization to AO would just become differences between the scalability levels.
You asking about the volume fog? Sure, new blank project, added some cube grids in the middle of default terrain, in already existing heightfog I changed only two things,density to 0.5 and enabled volumetric fog.Difference is drastic with sg.GlobalIlluminationQuality 3 vs 1. See attached screenshots.
And besides that issue with volumetric fog, can you (for regular fog) please either make eye adaptation setting for heightfog density, expose eyeadaptation in BP, or make eyeadaptation node in post material work “scene color before dof” ?. Autoexposure and regular fog do not mix well.
