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New Video Tutorial: Light a photorealistic Unreal scene in under 4 minutes

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Hey everyone,

we created a new video tutorial for you that shows how to easily upgrade an Unreal scene to physically correct lighting.

To make this process as easy as possible, we created a Physical Light - Cheat Sheet on our website. We also added a download feature so you can download the cheat sheet as .pdf and use it, whenever you need it.

Physical Light - Cheat Sheet

We really hope these additions help you getting started with physically correct lighting!

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brybalicious

Thanks! I used physically based lighting in some architecture projects a while ago before UE5. However the Global Illumination and Exposure engines were not able to handle it, and intense light was bleeding through all of the walls into interior spaces. Hopefully that's resolved with Lumen now.

One difficult issue is that I use a great plugin called Ultra Dynamic Sky for really quickly lighting the scene and getting fantastic weather effects. I noticed the plugin's directional light actor has an intensity value of ... 5 lux  :s Asked the dev what they think. We'll see...

In such a case is there any workaround with Cinematographer Pro? Or currently is it using only physically based lighting units?

Thanks

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lumines_labs

Ah, nice that you asked them. Pleas let us know what their answer is! 


There is a workaround but we would only recommend it in cases where there is really no other option. You can cheat the physically light system by entering negative ND Filter values. But this completely defeats the purpose of Cinematographer and you will only benefit from the UI changes and the new image effects. The results will not be photorealistic, since it is no more physically based. 

Hope that information helps!

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brybalicious
Quote from lumines_labs

Ah, nice that you asked them. Pleas let us know what their answer is! 


There is a workaround but we would only recommend it in cases where there is really no other option. You can cheat the physically light system by entering negative ND Filter values. But this completely defeats the purpose of Cinematographer and you will only benefit from the UI changes and the new image effects. The results will not be photorealistic, since it is no more physically based. 

Hope that information helps!

Hi. Everett the UDS dev told me the solution - you can change the sun values but you have to change them in the 'Sun' section of the Ultra Dynamic Sky actor, rather than in the directional light component which gets overwritten.


Verbatim: 

Sure, you can use any sun intensity you want. Just make sure you're adjusting the exposed Sun Light Intensity variable, in the UDS' Sun category. It sounds like maybe you were trying to adjust intensity on the light component directly?

I can confirm that it works, but as per my previous comment, it's clear that Unreal has issues when using physical values. The Debug Focus plane is unable to display in the correct colour, and only registers opacity. I guess this is about how Unreal's lighting engine renders colour at such high lux values? Do you have any recommendations for this?

Thanks

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lumines_labs

Thank you for the update! Great to know that UDS is supporting physically correct light. Yes physically correct light still seems to be an afterthought and is very buggy in actual use. For the Debug Focus Plane you can create higher contrast by changing the alpha value in the color selector. Hope this information helps!