Hello! I’ve worked with alot of 2d stuff before, but recently I’ve been interested in trying to do some 3d things with UE4. The first big jump for me has been lighting… I don’t really understand how to make anything that looks good.
I added the editor sphere static mesh to my scene, and gave it a metallic material. My goal thus far, has just been to make it look like it does in the Material preview as far as lighting. I tried adding a spotlight above it but it didn’t really work, it just got really bright at the top and completely black everywhere else. Can anyone tell me how to achieve lightning something similar to the Material Preview? any good tutorials on lighting for UE4?
Thanks,
I think you mean Lighting, not Lightning
Anyways, you just need to learn standard lighting techniques, it applies to any 3D app so you don’t need to specifically look for UE4 tutorials on it. The reason for the blackness is because in the real world light bounces and you get illumination in areas that the light source doesn’t directly reach, so to fix that you can either build your static lighting, which will calculate how the light bounces, or you can add more lights to fake the look.
did you also add a reflection capture actor to your scene?, the material preview has a default reflection and if you don’t have a reflection capture in your scene with metallic materials you can get the same effect you describe with half lit and half black meshes.
I did add one reflection capture, but it didn’t seem to make a big difference, it lit the bottom a little, but no where near as bright as the material preview.
The preview uses some kind of environment map for the reflections, in your scene if you have nothing around the sphere then there’s nothing to reflect.