I searched around and checked some settings that might cause this problem.
My meshes already have a second UV set and the Light map coordinate index are set to 1.
The light map resolution is also increased to 128 to see if that would solve the problem.
However the UE4 mannequins are the only thing catching light. So I think it’s safe to say the problem is probably with my material or mesh settings. But I’m not sure what!
It led me to check on my HDRI set-up. Which is a Editor Sphere with an Unlit material with emissive color but I could not find anything there that might cause this problem. There’s also a Stationary Skylight in this level set to capture scene. I have also placed a lightmass importance volume in the scene.
If I add an additional point light, the light would work just fine but the directional light is still not lighting the scene properly.
And I am out of ideas! Please, if anyone has anything or need anymore information about the scene so as to better hone in on the problem, feel free to let me know. I have tried everything I can think of and it doesn’t seem to be helping. Thank you in advance!
First, check you auto exposure settings and make sure it is active. Try to decrease min brightness and check it again (This makes the camera to read more lighting data from the darker objects of the scene).
Secondly, try to increase the sky light intensity and see if it helps.
Thirdly, an issue I can see is that your scene components are so dark. It makes them to capture less light. In fact the darker an object is, more lighting data will be missed. So try to increase your scene components’ brightness. To check how dark your scene components are, go to view mode > buffer visualization > base color. You can also check your scene histogram by typing ‘ShowFlag.VisualizeHDR 1’ inside the console command. More lighting data accumulated to the left, more lighting data are missing. The same thing goes for the right side. There is no any exact solution to the histogram (where its pointer should be), its a little advanced to learn how to work with histograms, but try to keep lighting data at the middle (inside an open scene). Always try to set scene components to be equally bright. Cuz you can then by playing with post processing settings get what you want from the scene. But if you set your scene components so dark, then post processing can’t help you with getting correct lighting data from the scene.
Thank you very much for your reply! I really appreciate it.
I tried tweaking the parameters that you mentioned but to no avail.
I actually have set up my materials so I can brighten the textures, but brightening the textures did not help with the scene too.
With the Skylight, the scene did indeed got brighter but it’s an overall brightness and there’s still no apparent directional light affecting the meshes.
I too tried increasing the directional light intensity but it still didn’t work.
Also something I forgot to mention. Before the bake it actually looks fine(it’s dark but at least things are getting lit from the directional light), but it’s after the bake where everything would look really dark
How many stationary lights are you using for your scene?
turn on cast shadows, go to view mode > optimization view modes > stationary light overlap. Then check if your screen is green not orange or red.
This looks to me like the problem with normals. I don’t know what you are using to make these models, but in Blender you select all faces, then go to Mesh - Normals - Recalculate Outside. After that, it’s desirable to check UV maps again.
So if with point light you see lighting results then I think it’s almost certain that it’s your directional light!
Have you tried to delete it and place a new default to the scene?
Can you show the directional light’s setup please?
Could you show us a lightmap sample view mode after building lights?
“There’s also a Stationary Skylight in this level set to capture scene”…
So you have a skylight + a HDRI skydome too in the scene?!
It could be ambient occlusion settings or AO in the materials (if there is any). Min Occlusion, contrast, exponent, and a few other settings at certain values could result in scene darkening and object / character overshadowing.
