Does anyone know why is this happening?? It only happens when I put a specific number of lights.
Hey @NomeUE!
Have you built your lighting yet? Usually, that will fix things like this!
You say it’s only when you use a specific number of lights?
Is it only at certain intensities? Could you turn the intensity of the lights down and it still happen?
It is likely a Lumen issue, and it may go away when you build the game, as well. Try these things out and get back to us!
does this also happen at runtime? like in PIE (the play button at the top)
does it stop with more lights? (this shouldn’t be the case, though it could in some situations it can be)
if you move the lights closer to the walls or the walls closer to the lights, does that make it less pronounced or goes away.
you might be running against a max calculations of light bounces. To keep performance “reasonable” while navigating in the editor the engine will reduce the number on maximums for things. When you hit PIE the window of the game at that time has many of these “restrictions” removed or softened, because it is supposed to be more clearly matching what the engine will be doing after a build.
there are still things that are kind of limited in the Editor that will not be limited in a full build (even Development build); these limits are usually safeguards that are trying to avoid a catastrophic crash.
if this still happens during PIE/build, or after manually forcing the lighting to build you may need to look into a few things:
- this could be hardware related where your graphics card or APU physically cannot do the calculations either in the form of raw compute or like VRAM; meaning you may have a hardware target situation, and maybe a legitimate “minimum/suggested specifications” for the point of release.
- reduce the number of lights in the scene. (this is probably not what you want to hear but one of those “if it hurts don’t do it” kind of thing)
- adjust the distance of the lights. in the properties of the light itself where these reflections the primary contributor is distance of the light ray.
- maybe add an invisible light in that corner to produce a desired shadow though this can create some “anomalies” with moving objects (kind of like the nail polish to cover up a paint chip/scratch)
- adjust the “number of bounces” in the Post-Processing volume to clean this up
- the most direct answer is to look into “baked lighting” instead of dynamic shadows though this will have many of the negative effects of “baked lighting” namely needing to re-bake every time you change the scene/level, and other things dealing with level streaming.
I also tried building the lighting, but the bug is still there, I tried to change the intensity of the lights and that changes nothing, I also tried puting less lights and that removed a big part of the error, but there’s still some shadows poping in and out, I don’t really know if it could be my GPU, it also happened before, a friend of mine send me a map and then i had the same shadow bug, i actually have a GTX 1660 SUPER and I have already updated the drivers, if that helps
I already tried doing all of this, the best solution was reducting the number of lights but there is still some shadows poping in and off, if it was my GPU what can I do? I already updated the drivers and all of that.
does it still do this in PIE? (when you hit the play button at the top)
what are the settings in your Post Processing Volume
?
in the Post Processing Volume
Rendering Features-> Path Tracing
is that enabled? what is the value in that box (I think disabled and like 32 is the default) if you drop this to something like 16 or 8 does that make it better? It might not be super sharp but it should clean up the jagged stair step effect, and this should be something that is modified by settings configurations kind of anyways. if not having a shadows option that is basically “pre-baked shadows”
I already tried changing the post process volume config, and it’s also still happening in PIE, it could be my computer, a friend of mine sent me a unreal proyect and when i opened it, it had the same problem, If it was my computer, how can I fix it? Maybe I should try removing and installing UE5 again
try verify the install first (in the Launcher there is a down arrow on the engine tile, and one of the options “should be” “verify
”
this will do a check sum on the install of the engine, and determines what parts are “damaged” and retrieve those, limiting the size/time relative to just re-downloading the whole engine again.
for the computer itself:
your fiend what hardware are they running? is it markedly different to yours in tiers?
could you send them the project you are experiencing this issue with and see if they experience the same?
could you include some steps from a template that re-creates this situation. as few steps as possible, and either post the steps you took, or zip the project files and upload those somewhere? (the zip file is probably not the greatest as virus/trust things, but someone might look at it to see if they experience similar)
are you experiencing random colored triangles?
things persisting for a second of 2 after they should be gone in other applications/games?
The worst case “random rainbow triangle spaghetti” (you will know it if you see it, so if you haven’t seen this then ‘don’t worry about it’)
if you open up task manager while the Engine is running and go to “Performance” then select your GPU; look at the Core usage, and VRAM are these close to the max values. at which point your answers are “work within those envelopes” or “maybe upgrade”
When I say “maybe upgrade” I don’t mean go out and buy a brand newest Quadro or 4090 SUPER TI (I know this is currently not a real product…) but you could look at something 1 or 2 generations old toward the top of the stack. the good news is that often times when new GPUs are released it can reduce the price of cards lower in the stack and of previous generations. Generally for NVidea “try” to stay XX60 or higher, though XX70+ should be “OK” for AMD their tier-numbers can be all over the place. I know Intel has a GPU division, but they have still not released their latest generation since the NVidea 30XX series, and I haven’t seen concrete what those new cards will even be.
So, look into more current reviews which will often include cards of previous generations particularly for those upgrading even though you might be looking at those “as the upgrade”
for your current card you could keep it (assuming it still generally works) as a performance benchmark target for your own project(s) when you are closer to release, to see if you are OK with the performance on the “lower hardware” or if you need to suggest something higher.