Lighting

Lighting mindset

Source:

Notes:

• Light direction
• Light size:

• Color and intensity

Lumen Settings & Light Sources

Source:

UE Version: 5.5

Lumen Settings:

World Settings:

• Force No Precomputed Lighting -> true

Project Settings:

• Default RHI -> DirectX 12
• Dynamic Global Illumination Method -> Lumen
• Reflection Method -> Lumen
• Use Hardware Ray Tracing when available -> true
• Keep in mind that you need NVIDIA RTX graphic card for hardware ray tracing
• If you don't have one, you can still use software ray tracing
• Software Ray Tracing Mode -> Detail Tracing
• Ray Lighting Mode -> Surface Cache
• MegaLights -> true
• Shadow Map Method -> Virtual Shadow Maps
• Support Hardware Ray Tracing -> true
• Texture LOD -> true
• Path Tracing -> true
• Generate Mesh Distance Fields -> true

Light Sources:

Set Mobility to Movable for all light sources to use Lumen computations.

✨ Directional Light

It acts like a sun in the scene.

Settings:

• Source Angle makes the shadows softer
• Source Soft Angle influences only the metalic surfaces
• Indirect Lighting Intensity with value 0 disables Lumen

✨ Point Light

It emits light in all directions from a single point. Great for adding localized lighting.

Lighting Interiors

Source:

UE Version: 5.3

Lighting and shadow course

• Directional light:
• Do not use the high values for intensity for non-PBR lighting scenarios.
• Light sources:
• Disable megalights (UE5.5+)
• Volumetric Scattering Intensity
• PostProcessVolume:
• Skylight Leaking is used for indoor non-PBR lighting.
• Screen Traces -> false (Global Illumination settings)
• Screen Traces -> true + Final Gather Quality -> high values (Global Illumination settings)
• Exposure metering mode -> Manual
• Exposure Compensation -> 0.0
• Auto Exposure Apply Physical Camera Exposure -> false
• Camera Settings in case of PBR
• Infinite Extent (Unbound) -> true
• Project Settings:
• Support Hardware Ray Tracing -> true
• Shadow Map Method -> VirtualShadowMaps
• Use Hardware Ray Tracing when available -> true
• Ray Lighting Mode -> HitLighting for Reflections
• Reflection method -> Lumen
• Dynamic Global Illumination Method -> Lumen
• Fog:
• Exponential Height Fog can be used for both exponential and volumetric fogs.
• Local Fog Volume enables the local fog only under the light source influence and is controlled by main Exponential Height Fog at the same time.
• Console commands:
• r.VolumetricFog.InjectRaytracedLights -> 0/1 (default 0)
• r.VolumetricFog.GridSizeZ -> 1-1024 (default 512)
• r.VolumetricFog.GridPixelSize -> 1-1024 (default 8)
• Key points:
• Layers for depth
• Eye lighting for character lighting
• Color grading, color palette preset and color script on preproduction
• Key frames and references on preproduction
• Detailed lighting scenarious
• Interactive lighting for reflection of the actions what are going on the scene
• PBR vs non-PBR lighting
• Render passes for layers postproduction in Nuke

Bugs:

Bug no. 1

Fix 1:

Fix 2:

Final result:

Bug no. 2

Fix 1: