Making WidgetComponents on in-world computer screens emit light

I am making a game where there are a lot of screens that the player interacts with. These are physical displays in the level and I would like to make widgets and display them on computer screens.

What’s the problem? If I just put a widget component on a computer monitor actor it’s not really visible in the level since it’s not emitting light. How can I fix this?

You probably want to use emissive materials:

Using the Emissive Material Input in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.6 Documentation | Epic Developer Community

Or you can put a non-shadow casting, low radius, spot light behind your screen.

Several ways to do this.

Thank you very much for your answer, I learned a lot trying to use an emissive material, but I could not get it to work in a simple way in the end. The only way I made it with emissive materials was by making a camera create a texture from looking at my widget as described in this tutorial:

Creating an interactable monitor with a rendered screen directly on a mesh surface in Unreal Engine 5.4. | by Elias Pereira | Medium

But the actual simple solution I used in the end was I created a new actor, added the widget as a component inside it and under Rendering set the RGB values greater than 1. It was fast and simple.

1 Like