I came across a game made in UE5 and I was wondering how did they manage to get these soft and light shadows even though there doesn’t seem to be any light nearby. I’m also making a game in UE5 and this is how my shadows look there (I’m sure you can tell which image it is). Would you have any idea how the lightning in that game could have been made? My game uses lumen and the other game should use it too, I’ve noticed that lumen noise on some places.
Shadow softness will be based on shadow method and the lights source radius (not attenuation radius). It doesn’t really have anything to do with Lumen, as direct shadows are handled by the aforementioned shadow method which is set completely independent of lumen.
Lumen does control indirect shadow, however - and indirect shadow tend to be very soft. This is because you can sort of think of all objects that bounce light as large light sources with respect to the bounced ray. A wall is kind of like a giant rect light, as light from even a single point will hit across it’s whole surface and then bounce across a large area.
With that said, backrooms games are probably a perfect example of a game style that is likely better off using primarily baked lighting. I’d question the value of real time GI at all if your project is full of mainly just static lights and geometry. But I’ll leave that to you, I don’t know your projects needs.
argueably not. you can achieve subtle horror just adding a silhouette of soft shadows crossing the screen or a local gi disturbance to fake a presence behind you or somewhere in the room.
There are many ways to achieve an effect like that, and that certainly is an easy way to do it. But it doesn’t really make sense to me to pay the real time GI tax for gimmick effects you can achieve without, unless it’s making significant contributions elsewhere anyway.
Not saying don’t use Lumen, just ask what value is it actually bringing that couldn’t be done without. Obviously I’m a huge fan of real time GI but not every project gets much benefit.
Thanks for the answer. So you’re saying the scene with these light and probably more realistic shadows and dark areas was made using baked lightning? If that’s the case, I can’t really use baked lightning in my project as the map is procedurally generated in real time. I also noticed you get similiar shadows like those in the picture when using emissive lightning, but I still have no idea how they avoided these dark shadows in the corners that are most likely caused by lack of bounces and indirect lighting in that area. That would be another proof of baked lighting being used there, but the lights in the game start to be noisy and then turn off in a certain distance, and when looking directly at the source (or atleast what looks to be the source), the whole scene gets suddenly darker. That means that the first scene must be completely made using real GI somehow.
I’ve done some testing and comparing my results to the scene in the first image and I found out it might have been made just by setting the indirect lighting intensity really high. The problem in my project is that I have very thin walls and making it thicker would mean I would have to recreate the whole map, as it’s made out of several types of chunks that generate in real time (I created it when I was a complete beginner and thought it would be the best method, but now I know that making an algorithm that would generate just walls and not entire chunks would be much better). I’ll try to create a small scene with thicker walls and other improvements and then I’ll decide whether to make the whole map generation again or leave it as it is.
If you’re doing a procedural map, baked lighting would be tricky - so yeah dynamic GI is likely the way to go.
And yeah, very high indirect lighting would create those soft shadows due to it basically turning the walls and floors into huge surface area lights.
I wouldn’t assume that specific effect means GI must have been used - but it would be good evidence for it. I’d have to take a closer look, but all of that stuff can be faked. Regardless, you’ll probably need to make it work with dynamic light either way for a procedural.
Thanks for all the advice. I’ll definitely go for high indirect lighting intensity then. Do you have any advice how to decrease the noise from indirect lighting and those annoying lumen lines that appear when turning a corner fast?
You can increase lumens update speed in the PPV or via cvar, but some delay is inevitable. Higher frame rates help, too.
As for noise in the dark, you can increase the temporal accumulation buffer and probe resolution.
Got it, I’ll try everything out after I get home and will probably rework my entire map generation that I worked on for a few months when I thought that making a perfect game with no experience and plans is very easy, but I atleast learned from my mistakes.
Hello, sorry for bothering you again, but I tried the new lighting technique with higher indirect lighting intensity and I have a few problems (I hope these are the last ones).
Weird spots of light when the light is bouncing off the ceiling and wall onto the floor.
This is how it looks, one of the pictures is how it looks in game, the second one is with all light channels turned off for the floor. Does this have any solution?
Ive seen some posts already mentioning this, but the responding people either didnt know what to do with it or never seen it in their projects. For me its happening no matter what settings I have and I dont think the game is really playable with that.
I also tried to fix the lumen delay, but increasing the lumen update speed didnt help at all. What helped instead was making the objects that the light was bouncing off darker, but now my world has very dark shadows again. I guess Ill have the find the right balance.
that bounce looks normal. not sure what you expect it to look like.
and… yes… megalights has some “trouble” with very dark rooms or a large variance of light and dark. that’s the stochastic sampling stragety and light threshold. a lil more ambient light usually fixes it. you gotta tone your lighting correctly. not too much contrast.
Alright, thanks. The spot in the first issue is not really visible in the picture, but that area should be a bit darker and its visible when moving around. Here its more noticable.
