Brightness issues on unlit areas.

Hello UE4 community, I’m currently working on an Options Menu system and I designed a Brightness Slider for players to adjust, this changes the post-process Gamma from 0.85 up to 1.35, which causes the following problem: It is currently possible to use the brightness slider to “cheat” the game and avoid leveling up Illumination Spells, because when you adjust the brightness, dark areas will lit as well.

Is there a better approach to this ? Any suggestions anyone can give me ?

Thanks everyone.

Hello Narg,

So you have a few options available to you via the Post Processing alone, and using a combination of the few techniques will give you more control over your dark areas while maintaining the look of your scene. The first suggestion is to lower the max Gamma value that you are allowing users to adjust via the slider. It sounds like dark areas are important in your game, so allowing players to modify the darkest areas via a gamma slider probably isn’t the best approach.

The next suggestion is to use the ‘Auto-Exposure’ setting within your Post Process Volume. You can establish a Min and Max brightness to allow user to still see in the dark areas, without having to modify the overall brightness of the screen. This is usually done at the beginning of production so after you have established the Min and Max brightness, you begin building your lighting around those settings. If you do this at the end of your project, you might end up having areas that appear blown out or even too dark.

Auto-Exposure

My last suggestion would be to use other settings within your Post Process Volume like the Crush Shadows and Crush Highlights. This gives you direct control over the highlights and shadows of your scene, while maintaining the overall brightness. All of these in combination with one another should be enough to avoid letting players "cheat’ your Illumination spells in your game.

Regards,

Thank you Andrew, I’ll look into it tomorrow and then come back with the results! =D