Unlit Material for HUD is drawn darker than original

Development Rendering
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1

Hi

I am trying to implement a HUD using materials to make animation of the HUD easier.
Currently I am only using a material wich is set to unlit, so that it wouldn’t appear completely black, because obviously there’s no light in the HUD. First there’s only one simple texture used as emissive color for the material.
I expected the material to be drawn just like the texture I use as emissive color but on the screen it appears a lot darker or with much more contrast. I am not a technical artist but none of my co-workers could help me either.
Is there anything we missed out on?

This is the original HUD

14648-gui+layout+05.png

This is it in-game (there’s no alpha channel used on the HUD itself except for the glassy parts)

14649-hudingame.png

Thanks in advance, Max

2

Hi Max,

I’m getting the same behavior as well. A work around would be using a “Draw Texture Simple” node instead of a material, but hopefully a staff member, or a smart community member, could provide some insight on why materials are drawn so dark on the GUI.

3

Can I see your rendering code?

4

Here it is. It looks a lot different now, but the problem still remains… all the nodes are just to specify the size. still looks pretty dark on-screen

14723-hudnode.png
14723-hudnode.png1198×349 138 KB

5

yeah i hope so, because we cant do without the materials. Its our way to animate the HUD using parameters. For now we need to lighten it up by hand :confused:

6

I had this problem using FCanvasTileItem (C++), the effect may also occur with blueprints.
It was the DrawColor of my Canvas. I don’t know how you have the possibility in blueprints to affect it, but if you have no idea I can provide you some code.

The DrawColor is at (0.8,0.8,0.8) or something like that. It should be 1,1,1

7

I dont think there is a draw color used in hud draw material. At least i can’t access one anywhere. Matter of fact the problem doesn’t occur when drawing a texture instead of a material. But the material shouldn’t do anything else than drawing the same texture with the original brightness… At least i understand thats what the “unlit” setting is for

8

It took me 2 days to track down the answer to this. You want to use DrawTexture (with blend mode opaque) not DrawMaterial. I know this is way after the fact but for the next person that comes across this problem.

9

Necro-ing this post because info here helped me solve the problem which for some reason STILL persists in UE5.1.

At the end of your Unlit material add a power node and put it to 0.5 exponent.

This results in a correct material render in the HUD.

10

It still persists in UE5.2. You have to use Power(Color, 1/2.2) as emissive input (surface domain) or diffuse (UI domain). the material is always rendered in linear color space, i don’t know yet why it is like this. This also counts for “DrawMaterialTriangle”.