UE5 VR Lighting

Hi, rather new to the forums and new to UE5. I learned Unreal Engine back around the early 2010’s and then never got to use it all that much since, now I’m looking on getting back in as I’m getting into VR development.

In short, the lighting in UE5 is a bit intense compared to what the Quest 2/Oculus ideally supports. The templates run fine, but then once you add a few extra things it quickly becomes too much, at least on my end. I’ve built an entire warehouse from scratch, for a training simulator, though all of the lighting is crashing the game when I go to run it on my Quest 2.

Is there a way to “tone down” or “dull” the lighting in UE5? What I’m working on is very minimalistic with an almost smoothed out cartoony look, though the lighting (even on low scalability) is casting super detailed black shadows from every source unless I turn off “Cast Shadows.”

I appreciate anyone’s response, and if you want to point me the direction of a tutorial on this or even a good beginners or intermediate course on UE5 and VR (I’ve watched several on YouTube but they don’t go far past the VR template), I would be pretty thrilled!

Thanks again!

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Sounds like the lights are set to Moveable, which means they are not baked and calculated in realtime. Set as many lights as possible to Static, this will bake the lighting and give you softer shadows as a result of light bounces.

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Hello @Spencer.AMD and welcome!
Here’s some documentation I advice you to read before working on a VR project with UE4/5:

Forward Rendering

CPU Lightmass Global Illumination

Volumetric Lightmaps

Reflections Captures

As @Milisours was suggesting, you should set as many lights as possible to Static, use very few Stationary and Dynamic.

Oculus docs about performance with UE5

I hope this will help!

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ok