Hello, I’ve been running into a rendering issue with Spotlights when using an Orthographic camera. The light, if it shows up at all, appears extremely pixelated, appearing as a set of hard edge boxes of light that wiggle around as the camera moves.
Point Lights and Directional Lights work completely fine. Please see attached screenshot to see what I mean.Both lights in the example are stationary and have been built. This scene also has a dim directional light point at the level. Please note the soft shadows along the bottom of the rocks are created with sprites and are not part of the lighting.
I have messed with a lot of settings and done some research, but so far nothing has worked. I’m happy to provide more information and screen caps of settings, but I’m not sure what will be most helpful so let me know.
Has anyone solved this before?
is this baked and dynamic spot lights and in all areas?
is your lightmass importance volume covering all of the map?
is this a default spotlight or one with tweaked settings?
how far from the objects is the light?
are you using models or some kind of sprite setup?
there was another issue posted recently that had an issue with a similar look but i suspect the issues are different.
Thanks for the reply! Went through your questions, tried a few things, and still have the problem. Here are my answers to your questions in order:
- Right now this is a stationary spotlight. And yes, it happens in all areas.
- Yes
- It has tweaked settings. Main things of note are casting shadows turned off (it still does the weird pixelated thing with them turned on as well), intensity way up, and position is about 1000 units away from the level. The distance away if because the light won’t show up at all if it is closer than this. I think this also has to do with orthographic camera.
- See above.
- We are using sprites. 3D models fare no better (see attachment).
- I looked at the issue in that thread, and I do believe it is something else. We aren’t seeing that particular problem. Thanks for passing it along, though.
Any other ideas?
Cheers,
well, i found this and a ton of other reports of similar issues (google “ue4 orthographic camera bug” and you’ll get lots).
sounds like orthographic cameras are broken and you should use a perspective one. :\
Ya, doesn’t look good. =(
We had been using a custom made darkness system before that just used a dark overlay with circular masked portions around “lit” objects. We decided to try and switch to regular lighting because we heard that it was working now that the forward renderer was working. Seems like that is not the case, and we will probably revert back to our old system.
Thanks for the help, and the answers.
Are you using forward lighting? I believe it was added with 4.17 but I haven’t used it.
We are using the forward renderer. Is that the same thing? I haven’t heard of forward lighting.
I believe so. I’m not very familiar with the rendering process but my understanding is that there is forward and deferred.
also just found this: https://forums.unrealengine.com/unreal-engine/feedback-for-epic/1346092-every-type-of-light-working-with-ortographic-camera-3d-view
