Textures extremly contrasted in dark areas

Development Rendering
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Hello Everyone,

I am currently testing Unreal engine, and I have some issues with textures contrast.
While they look alright in lit areas, they look extremly over contrasted (in luminosity, color saturation doesn’t change) in areas that are dark and/or only lit by the ambiant light. Some areas are even so contrasted that you see pure black with absolutely no details in parts of the texture!

It only does it in Unreal and not in the other engine I was using before.

As Unreal doesn’t support standard ambiant light, I have tried to fake it using an ambiant cubemap in the post process, or by using a skylight, but both gives the exact same result.

It doesn’t seem to come from the post process, as I have tried by disabling them all. I don’t really think it comes from the material neither, as I have tried with basecolor only and it’s exactly the same.

As our level are pretty big, the lights are fully dynamic (I have tried the meshes/textures in particle demo, and baked the lights, but it’s the same also)

You can check the 2 attached pictures, you really see the contrast problem on the 2nd one on the left (bottom of the wall completly dark and burned, high contrast on the stone beams etc…)

Do you have any idea from where it comes from, and how to correct this?

Thanks in Advance for your help!

2

I believe what you’re seeing is ambient occlusion. Ambient occlusion of course has nothing to do with texture contrast but will make the scene darker in crevices and corners. Also if the material you’re using has a high degree of metalness then you may need to add a sphere reflection capture actor to your scene.

That is all to say that your scene appears to be working correctly but you might need to adjust the ambient occlusion post process in order to get what you’re looking for. Although, to me, your scene looks pretty good, for the lighting you have the dark parts seem fairly reasonable.

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Thank you for your answer!
Unfortunately it’s the AO post process, as I have tried to disable it and it’s still the same. It’s not metalness neither as the material has none (just simple diffuse map :frowning: )
I guess it’s juste UE behavior, and I am not used to it! I will see how to solve that later, for now, let’s make a game ^^