When creating metal materials in UE5 and applying lighting, strange flickering occurs, as seen in the video. Is this a known issue? Could you provide a solution? (I’ve done some research on my own, but there don’t seem to be as many people experiencing the same issue as I thought… Is this not a problem but a specification?)
Things I’ve tried:
Enabling hardware ray tracing
Using DirectX12
Applying lighting nearby
Lowering the Metallic value (reduces flickering but changes the appearance undesirably)
Increasing the Final Gather Quality value in PostProcessVolume
I’m using two RectLights for illumination. The material has Metalness set to 1, Roughness to 0.3, and colors configured, with other settings left at default simplicity.
The flickering may cease depending on the camera’s field of view (e.g., the latter part of the video on the sphere’s surface). The wheels of the tire always flicker, but in the case of the sphere, it seems to start flickering when a scooter appears on the screen.
I suspect this might be happening due to reflections from other objects on the metal surface.
Thank you for your reply.
It seems that everyone is facing the same issue, and indeed, it is related to Lumen.
(Does this mean that everyone already understood and no one raised the issue?)
The video I received exhibits the exact same behavior as mine.
In a way, it’s reassuring to know that everyone is experiencing this,
and I can now explain it to others.
You said, “It’s particularly bad with emissive materials near reflective surfaces”
was a significant hint for me.
Regardless of the material,
flickering is more pronounced when reflective surfaces are close to the light source,
and it diminishes as they move away.
When using reflective materials, it might be a good idea not to place them too close to the light source without consideration, and adjusting the scene exposure could be one way to address the issue if darkness is a concern.
Yeah this appears to still be a thing. What is further weird, turning off Lumen and enabling hardware raytracing on the current build 5.3.2 I turned off all Lumen, and turned on hardware ray tracing, and yet still getting a shimmer / flickering shadow on metallic surfaces.
Is there truly no way to solve this or is Unreal 5 just… not focused on UE 5 being usable for baked lighting or performance minded projects? Is it like… exclusively for Lumen it seems?
I’ve found no solution as of yet sadly. Which sucks cause I intended on releasing this big project I have in UE5 but due to lighting issues I may have to revert to UE4
Would you happen to know specifically, or exactly what needs to be disabled to have this disappear entirely? Like, I have a project I am beginning to light, and I have lots of experience with lighting in Unreal 4 so, I’ve never seen this weird stuff ever.
I disabled and enabled everything I could find that was recommended and yet the issue still persists… What exactly would the settings need to be to have this gone for a Baked lighting approach?
Absolutely, I’ve been up and down the most basic of searches to big deep dives that google can offer and have had zero luck in getting the shadowy flickering to go away that seems to come with Lumen. It’s either that or something else has changed in UE5 that is creating weird shadowy flickering even when lumen is off.
but every where I’ve looked people are pointing to Lumen being the problem. Which is weird… cause to my knowledge I have it completely disabled.
