I’m working on a realistic lighting project that shows photography based lighting with both hot lights and flash based with and without modifiers (softboxes, scrims, gobos, etc.) and am coming across some severe limitations in how Epic implements lights.
I’ve tried creating 3 different lighting BPs, point, spot and rectlight with a simple softbox mesh but each have major weaknesses as outlined below. Note that this is dynamic movable lighting only so please no feedback on static as it won’t work in my project.
- Spots have decent shadow and throw simulation but don’t show catchlights in model eyes.
- Point is worthless as it has little useful control and shadows are harsh.
- Rectlight gives a realistic catchlight that is sized well in the eye reflection but is ■■■■ bag for soft shadows.
And I’ve experimented for the last month with all the settings on each of the light types but can’t get anything that will follow real world metrics as to shadowing, diffusion and reflection in catchlights.
I’ve beat the UE4 docs to death and what a frikkin useless, randomized mess those things are! I’ve watched dozens of YT vids with mostly gamer kids who don’t have a clue what inverse square law or feathered shadows are and so they only work with game based static lighting. It seems Epic doesn’t understand real world dynamic lighting based on all the kludges they have. From what I can gather, they created these light sources primarily for open world games or static archviz reps and all their demos have numerous spots and points all over their maps and everything is baked based on a specific scene.
I’ve tried some of the so called lighting simulator assets but none of the kids knows how light works in the real world. So if there is anyone that understands what real world photography/cinema lighting entails, it would be greatly appreciated of any useful feedback for implementation in UE 4.26.
Regards,
MZ
