I am relatively new to Unreal Engine (UE5) and ran into a Movie Render Queue issue that I really want to understand.
When I render my interior scene using Movie Render Queue, the output looks completely different from my viewport. The direct sunlight hitting the floor is intact, but there is almost zero ambient or indirect bounce lighting on the walls and ceiling, making the entire room look crushed and dark.
A few important details about what is happening:
When I first encountered this, I ran multiple test renders and toggled different settings on and off. At some point, the issue mysteriously resolved itself and the renders came out bright with full bounce lighting. However, after reopening the project 2 days later, the exact same issue returned on frame 1 without me having changed anything.
If I render using the default/basic MRQ preset, the lighting renders normally with full indirect bounces. While I could just stick with the basic preset, I am currently learning UE5 and this inconsistency is really bugging me.I want to understand the actual root cause behind why this happens.
Manual Exposure is used: I am using Manual Exposure on my Cine Camera Actor (not Auto Exposure), so exposure adaptation is not causing the shift. Also all the anti-aliasing setting are same in both Mrq preset basic and custom.
I have attached comparison screenshots (the bright render vs. the dark render, along with my MRQ settings).
Any help or explanation would be greatly appreciated!
Are you sure it’s GI? It kinda looks like a missing light. It looks like you have a cool light coming in from screen left in one render, but not the other. MRQ goes into PIE/Game, so if you have that light on its own sublevel or something that needs to be loaded in the sequencer or set to always load. Also make sure that light is not Hidden in Game.
Hi Shaun thanks for the answer .So in the first render which is brighter is due to the hdri backdrop. But when rendering using the custom preset in MRQ which I shared in the screenshot earlier it is missing. So maybe there is something wrong in my HDRIbackdrop setting I have attached a screen shot.
Maybe. Is it there when you go into PIE? If you switch it from Captured Scene over to a HDR file does it stick around? Is hidden in game enabled anywhere?
Yeah it is there when I go into PIE I have already checked. The first screenshot is directional light turned of and skylight is set to captured scene And if I switch to specified cubemap , it is still there but there is a change you can see in the second screenshot and if I try to rotate it to check whether the lighting changes or not , it does not . Hidden in game is also not enabled.
