Firstly, I’ve disabled static lighting and auto exposure in my project. Secondly, I’m not using a Directional Light. I’ve got a single point light in my scene and everything looks great, except for some reason the shadow cast by the ceiling fan is pitch black. All of the other shadows on the rest of the furniture look fine. I’ve played with all of the light settings and increased the Environment Color from black to 127 grey, but this doesn’t make a difference (possibly because it’s for directional lights?) I’ve also tried moving the point light further away from the fan, but this makes no difference.
Since you’re using UE4, you don’t have access to Lumen’s global illumination. If you’re not using ray tracing either, this result is to be expected. What global illumination does is simulates the way that light bounces in real life. By default, rasterized lights do not bounce, meaning that only pixels in direct view of the light source will be affected by it. What confuses me about this scene is that the part of the fan that attaches it to the ceiling isn’t shadowed, when looks like it should be.
What you could do is a common artist trick, which is to place a rectangular light near the ceiling to simulate global illumination where there really isn’t any. You could also look into using an area light to achieve the same effect.
This may very well be what this scene would look like if it were real. Renders are often very eye-catching because they utilize unrealistic light tricks, as opposed to having one-light-per-bulb, so to speak. It really depends on what style you’re trying to achieve.
Thanks for the reply. Yeah, normally I don’t only use one light but in this case, the scene didn’t need more. The weird thing is why are the shadows on all the rest of the assets soft but only the fan’s shadow is really dark? I ended up just turning off the lighting on the fan and used a texture to simulate the shadow for the blades. And yeah, you’re right about the base of the fan not being shadowed. I can’t be bothered to figure out why. It’s a scene that I’m rendering out for a friend’s animation project so it’s not that crucial. Lighting in UE4 is really weird in my experience.
I know you said you disabled static lighting, but could the fan have a lightmap issue? It shouldn’t matter if the scene is lit dynamically, but lightmaps have always given me trouble in my experience. The lightmap UVs on the fan could be overlapping, resulting in it being lit incorrectly. But as I said, I don’t believe lightmaps are utilized in a dynamic scene, so I’m not sure.
Is the blend mode in the fan’s material set to translucent by chance? In a little example I put together, a material with its opacity set to 1 is still casting a colored point light shadow. I’m using UE5 so things might be different, but I’m curious if this has anything to do with your problem.
Yeah, it’s my understanding that lightmaps aren’t used when you disable static lighting. When I build lighting it finishes in like half a second so I’m pretty sure it’s not an issue. Also the fan is a skeletal mesh so it also shouldn’t be using lightmaps for that reason too. The material is just a basic material. No translucency or anything. Yeah, the lighting in UE5 has been completely rebuilt so I don’t think there’s any point in comparing.
Thanks a lot for trying to work out the issue with me. I just sent the final render to my friend so I’m happy with the result with using a texture for the shadow and turning off the shadow for the fan
