Currently when importing Rocks like from the Tundra Pack or Hartland Quay Shore, etc - these objects use M_MS_Default_Fuzz_Material which does not work with Lumen GI Bounce Lighting. Any ideas how to fix this material to make it work with Lumen?
(I temporarily switch all rocks to M_MS_Default_Material which helps but this shouldn’t supposed to be necessary right?
default:
(fresh install of megascans/lib/ue5)
This is strange, definitely. Generally, even lumen screen traces will work with, well, whatever’s on-screen, so not even getting bounced lighting from that is strange. To be honest, I’m not familiar with the material you speak of, but I just figured I’d offer the information. Do you know what it looks like in the lumen scene?
yeah it looks fine in the Lumen scene (it’s rendered normal, not being black. It’s really bizzar as this affects a huge chunk of the Megascans 3d Asset Library (a lot of those rocks are using that shader. I thought for sure I had broken it on my end which is why I uninstalled all traces of megascans and unreal and reinstalled everything setting up a new project but the problem is still there
The fuzz shading model just isn’t supported by lumen yet. Not sure if the Lumen pass switch works Lumen - Material Pass Replace Node
thats good info. thanks. might have to look into this deeper, as far as I understood Fuzz is a component of the cloth shading model so changing the shading model back to default should in theory disable fuzz and make the shader at least work with lumen? in practice changing it back to default lit does not seem to have an effect on the broken lumen lighting. will have to read up more about that I guess. just a bit baffled as I thought ue5.0 was supposed to be working out the box with megascans assets
Just out of raw curiosity, how come fuzz is used on rock shaders? It seems a strange thing to use such an effect for.
And to comment on that, I don’t think UE5 will work perfectly out of the box with any megascan assets for the forseeable future, they talked about that a bit in their lumen scene. From an art perspective, they offer that the ‘physical’ values aren’t always the right values for scenes, almost every rock in VOA had its’ albedo boosted significantly to actually bounce good-looking light around. I think it’ll be easier to download given the in-engine browser, and easier to tune, but we may have to do a bit of manual work for a little while, yet.
I guess the idea is to add an extra layer for softer elements like moss on rocks from wet biomes. All “dry” rocks like the desert ones use the non-fuzz standard material - which kind of makes sense. A warning sticker for these assets would have been great like: “not fully compatible with ue5.0, please change material manually”. Took me a while to figure out whats wrong since all debug scenes look right.
Ah, this makes more sense to me. I can understand lumen having a hard time with layered materials like this, and I think Strata’s multi-layered materials will make things even more complex, but could offer better lighting support for phenomena like this.
I’ve never worked with that fuzz material (or many megascans in general), so I really couldn’t say how it works, now that lumen supports masking, I’ve gotten in the habit of placing textures on masked quads and placing them in front of geometry to have them be picked up. It’s not particularly performant or starightforward, but works well enough for archviz or test scenes.
just as an FYI: I just converted the megascans textures back to VT (did a conversion to regular textures due to other issues) and noticed that the fuzz shader actually DOES work with Lumen when VT is enabled. very confusing. will do some more ‘clean testing’ at a later point
Solution:
this issue actually has nothing to do with VT or no VT. plainly if:
Project Settings > Rendering > Misc Lighting: Allow Static Lighting
is turned off - indirect lighting of quixel assets breaks…
This issue is present in 5.1.1 and the solution with “allow static lighting” works there too… Would be great if this got fixed by epic.
Issue still present with 5.4.4. I wish Epic can put on hold all the new features and just try to iron out all these bugs. I’m no UE5 expert, not even close, but I find myself constantly having weird issue specifically with lighting bugs that I constantly have to stop what I’m doing and try to find a solution online.
