I’m trying to set up a plain white background for my game. I’ve tried experimenting with the Sky Sphere (setting all colors to #FFFFFF and setting cloud opacity and star brightness to 0.0). The background remains a dull gray color at best. (If I add stars, the stars are bright white, against the dull gray background).
How do I set the sky sphere (or perhaps atmospheric fog) to give a bright white background?
yo
So I think the easiest way seeming the sky sphere is just an object, is make a new sphere, import it and create a white material for it using a material expression constant set to 1 into the diffuse.
But if you really want to edit the sky sphere itself what you need to do is click on the sky then on the right in the details panel there should be a thing up the top saying ‘blueprinted components bust be edited in the blueprint’. Double click on the word blueprint and it should open it up. Click on the tab up the top called viewport then in the components tab click on Sky Sphere Mesh. Once you’ve done that on the right under materials double click on the material there. I’m not sure how much you know about the material editor but if you hold down the 1 key and click in blank space in the editor then you’ll create a material expression constant which is just 1 number. On the left with it selected, under the details panel you can change that number. if you set it to 1 and plug the node into the emissive colour plug then hit apply your sky will go white. Any higher than 1 and it will glow more and more the higher you go.
Hope this helps.
Thanks for this! I edited the mesh and changed the emissive color to 1. This gave the scene a similar dull-gray background. (I’ve edited the post to include an image). If I change the emissive color up to 100, it gets closer to white, but the scene gets washed out unfortunately.
Hmm yeah its getting washed out because of the glow from emissive. Might be better to use a backdrop and point a light at it. Or if you need a sky sphere making your own and then pointing multiple lights around. But yeah I can see what you mean with the grey. In the pic below I just pointed a light at my backdrop there and you can clearly see the difference. On that backdrop the material has a constant of 1 plugged into base colour, roughness and emissive colour and a 0 in metallic.
Also if you want to make a skysphere I just used a material sphere static object and made sure when I created the material that Two sided is ticked. If you try that it might work better for you. the problem is its casting a slight shadow on itself.
Thanks again, NotFil. I’ve been playing around with this more and would love to use an unlit material for the sky sphere. Unfortunately, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to assign a material to the sphere without editing the engine’s sky sphere blueprint. (That has been causing some troubles, because it affects all my other projects, and I’ve had to re-install UE4 a few times). Can I just set the sky sphere material to my own material, plain and simple? I feel like I’m fighting the engine every step of the way here…
I’m in the exact same boat. Why can’t I just simply press on the sky, hide the texture, and set the color to white? Does it seriously have to be this difficult?
Okay, so I’ve figured out what’s going on here.
UE4 reserves the ‘bright whites’ for emissive surfaces and blooms, and the engine softly clamps ‘normal’ (#FFFFF) white surfaces to a dim gray. This helps really bright materials and effects stand out. It’s handled by the tonemapper, which converts the scene from HDR to LDR.
There’s an interesting forum thread on it here: Washed out Colors from Tone Mapping: How bad it really is, and how to fix it - Rendering - Unreal Engine Forums.
Here’s a quote which explains the situation nicely:
"The current behavior is intended. The base color is a material attribute that combined with light (and view angle) becomes the HDR color which still needs to be tonemapped to become the LDR color so a monitor can display it. The tone mapping tried to be mostly linear but if the HDR input values get very bright it should softly clamp to white. This is needed as lighting can be brighter than 1 in many areas and we want to avoid clamping artifacts with that.
“The pipeline is setup to make it easy to get real (physically based) content. Having a different default (e.g. no tonemapper) would break that goal. We intend to make the tonemapper pass more programmable (You already can override the tonemapper pass creating a Postprocess Material replacing the tonemapper but getting access to the properties is very very limited) so for some applications this default behavior can be altered.” - Martin Mittring (Unreal Engine Developer, Epic)
Further reading:
