When using the Light Source option in either dynamic or stationary lights (haven’t tested static) it completely breaks specular highlights on objects around it, as you can see on both the terrain and the grass in this instance. If bloom is enabled, it overblows the entire screen with bloom, almost as if it’s compounding the light length specular repeatedly. The issue goes away on individual materials if you disable specular on it.
So just to confirm, this is by design? It seems a little strange that the specular highlights in the first image are brighter than the sun, and that in the second image where the light only has an intensity of 50 and isn’t actually making any visible light that the highlight is on the border of a matte material (0.9 roughness) causing bloom already.
Hello Daniel,
This is actually not a bug, but the functionality of Source Radius and Source Length of a Point Light. They are what define the size of specular highlights on surfaces. As such, when you increase the values for these settings, your specular highlights will increase in size across all of your materials and meshes that utilize specularity.
You can see these settings defined in our documentation on Lighting Basics. I would not use these options unless you know you need the size of your specular highlights increase on your objects in the scene affected by the light.
Thank you,
Yes this is by design. You have the sun light already illuminating the actor, and then once you add the point light and increase the source length or radius, you are amplifying the specularity on that mesh. Even with a low intensity, the specularity is going to be more prominent as that is the purpose of the source length and radius. Keep in mind, Specular and Roughness are tied together, but they each have their own controls. You can have a material that has a 0.9 roughness and then have the default specularity (0.6), that the material will show specular highlights.