The specular sparkle blooms disappear from the view port when RealTime redering is turned on and re-appear when RealTime is turned off. Additionally, they do not show up in-game.
Since it doesn’t make sense, I think this is a bug. To reproduce, set up a test map, add some assets that have Material Roughness set to 0 to create high speculars. I was using Substance Designer to create my materials. When the viewport mode is set to RealTime = Off, the sparkles are present, but when turned on, they disappear.
Everything is turned on to Max. I think it has something to do with using Substances. The floors in the above are from the Substance Atlantis and the rock-walls are some rock-walls I made with mine own custom parameterized Substances.
Is that the info you needed? Let me know if you were looking for something more specific… thanks!
Still trying to get a successful reproduction for this issue. If you would not mind post a screenshot of your post process volume (or camera) settings, I have gotten the Substance assets to directly test on, but I wanted to ask as well if you are adding anything into the specular input in your material either through the Material Editor or via Substance?
I’m not using the Specular channel for the rock walls - the Atlantis floors are at the default settings so you should have those. I am using a Roughness map. I’m not using a post processing volume. The Post processing Defaults in the Rendering Project preferences are all at default. I am not using any specific camera - except the default camera. It was just a little test environment to stick some characters in, so it never will get developed further - but I did create a camera actor, leaving all settings at default; jacked up the Bloom to 100 - and it looks like the screen shot when I do, but again, only when RealTime is off and the blooms don’t show in-game.
So to re-cap:
No specular map
Roughness map, controlled through Substance, and turned on via material instance using the Substance generated material as a parent.
Default camera/post processing settings (except in the below screenshot, where bloom is jacked to 100)
I plugged in temporary specular map - no effect either way.
Update - as I was playing around with this, I noticed that the blooms do show in the created camera, when the bloom is jacked to 100 in RealTime mode. Please see the screenshots.
I hope this can help you, but I’m thinking now, maybe I have some setting to adjust? I doesn’t make sense though that there should be such a drastic difference.
It sounds like a problem with the default Auto Exposure settings not yielding results that you are happy with. Try adding an Unbound Post Process volume (Post Process Volume, unbound option set to true) and adjust the Min and Max Brightness settings under Auto Exposure to both equal 1. This will effectively remove Eye Adaptation (which is happening when you turn off real time as well). Using a lower number than 1 will increase the overall brightness in your scene and using a number higher will darken the scene overall, but keeping the numbers equal should allow you to keep the Specular Bloom though you may choose to increase the bloom’s intensity separately through the Post Process Volume as well.
My guess would be that this is caused by TXAA. What you are essentially doing is intentionally creating specular aliasing. One of the advantages of TXAA is that it not only reduces edge aliasing, but also specular aliasing. TXAA does not work when your viewport is not set to realtime, which would explain the difference you are seeing when toggling real-time on and off.
Try disabling TXAA and you will probably get the effect you are looking for.
