Why would using Stencil Layers (under deferred rendering) make my renders unusably dark and incorrectly exposed

When rendering a sequence using the movie render queue, everything is fine.

I followed a tutorial to set up stencil rendering to separate out my foreground layer, and whenever my foreground stencil layer is selected under Deferred Rending, the image comes out weirdly darkly exposed.

Can anyone suggest what might be causing this please?

Rendering without stencil layer:

Rendering with stenctil layer:

maybe you have your Camera set to auto expose?
You need to manually expose, because for each stencil layer there is different amount of black in your screen.
I’m still stuck even getting the stencil layers to work… Do you work in unreal 5?

Thanks for your reply. I ended up going back to cryptomattes for this as I couldn’t figure it out. I tried both auto and manual exposure. Thanks again.

Hey! I know this is way after the fact, but if you haven’t discovered already, SADLY stencil layers don’t support certain things. In this case lumen’s global illumination making it relatively useless in many cases. It also doesn’t support nanite so if you rendered a stencil layer and it came out blank, it’s likely because the mesh was nanite.

A fun new bug in 5.2.1 is if you have nanite ANYWHERE in your scene, the stencil will render nothing. You have to actually delete the nanite meshes or convert them from nanite in order to get a stencil out of your render. Hope that helps you or anyone else who stumbles across this post.

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