Welcome!
Here's an issue I'm having. Starspheres. Now I've already taken the textures and replaced it with a brightness of 500, or even 500,000. Well take a look at my pictures
This is the regular cam
and this is the the Real Camera.... and I cranked the star brightness. It just doesn't show up as you see in the below picture...
Hey Jesse,
welcome to the forum and thank you very much for your awesome review! Much appreciated and we are glad you enjoy working with Cinematographer!
We are dealing with two different aspects here:
First, since StarSphere is a third party plugin we don’t own, we can’t say for sure but we can safely assume, that it is not calibrated for physically correct light. You can measure the stars brightness with a tool available in the viewport window. Click in the Viewport Show->Visualise->HDR (Eye Adaption). This will give you an UI to measure the scenes brightness like you would with a light meter. If you check our Physical Light Cheat Sheet you can see that stars on a moonless night have a brightness of 0.002 Lux. Since your scene doesn’t seem to have an atmosphere maybe a bit more but in that ballpark. With this tool you can increase the stars brightness until it’s correct.
The second aspect, since Cinematographer is physically correct and based on reality, there is currently no camera on earth, as far as we know, that could expose stars in realtime, at 24fps or more. That’s just too dark for any sensor without longer exposure times. So you could turn up the shutter speed to a second to expose your shot or the better solution, you could cheat physics and enter a negative ND Filter Value, which you can find in the Advanced tab under Configure Shot in your Real Camera.
So you see, you can’t expose the stars because you couldn’t with a camera in real life. But I hope the offered solutions will give you the results you are looking for. If not or if you have any further questions let us know, we are happy to help!
Good points. I shouldn't have said Starsphere... it's just a normal skysphere with a star image on it. I just named it StarSphere. I feel I should be able to crank the brightness to an insanely high number and it would show, but is that not the case? But you are correct, true video of the space shuttle shows no stars. But am I wrong about the image brightness?
I would also assume that extreme brightness should do the trick but maybe the shader is capped or something in that direction. Have you tried the negative ND Filter Value? That should hopefully give you the results you are looking for.
Negative ND filter value doesn't seem to do anything. I'll try some other star images. with maybe bigger stars and give you a report. Hey, how about turning off lens flare? Is that an option?
I tried some different star scenes, and they actually worked... so I suspect there is was clamping going on... so thanks for your help. I am still curious about the lens flares if you know.
So yeah, I just needed to pick a different skybox that allowed me to adjust brightness within the Material.... brightness within the image will get clamped. And I laughed because Unreal is a "reality" and photography of stars always takes some sort of backflip. So here's an image of everything working. Notice how bright I have to make the material to appear in the space scene. Life isn't really like "Star Wars"... I gotta remember that.
I had to laugh as well when I noticed that’s the reason. Nice to hear that it works now!
You can change your cameras characteristics like post process or lens flare settings in the Camera Component. There you have full access to all the cameras settings. Keep in mind that some of the settings like exposure get continuously overwritten by the RealCameraActor.
Hope that helps!
So yeah, I just needed to pick a different skybox that allowed me to adjust brightness within the Material.... brightness within the image will get clamped. And I laughed because Unreal is a "reality" and photography of stars always takes some sort of backflip. So here's an image of everything working. Notice how bright I have to make the material to appear in the space scene. Life isn't really like "Star Wars"... I gotta remember that.