Why are my scene's lighting and post process settings different depending on the computer?

I built a beautiful ArchViz scene at home that features bright and soft sunlight. To bring it to the office and share it with my coworkers (who are new to UE4), I zipped up the whole project directory and uploaded it to Google Drive. At work, I downloaded and extracted the files and fired up a fresh install of Unreal Engine.

The scene is very dark, the auto exposure and eye adaptation are not working at all, the lightmap resolution has been reduced by at least an order of magnitude (there are shadow bleeds and new splotches), and screen space reflections are totally absent. I’ve tried opening it in both the regular 4.4 engine as well as the source code version. I’ve re-downloaded and re-extracted the files to multiple locations. I packaged the game to HTML5 and it maintained all the same problems, although I expected errors regardless due to limitations. Tweaking the eye adaptation settings in the post-process volume does nothing for my lighting.

The worst part is: drum roll It works completely fine on my coworker’s computer. Everything is perfect, even though it is the same downloaded file.

The .exe of the same scene that I built from home runs just fine on my computer, so it can’t be a hardware issue, right? I’m so confused. Please help!

Hey StephaBon -

Could you post some screenshots of the different renderings, one with the correct look and one with the incorrect look? Also I think that this is an issue where I might need to see your project to help diagnosis the issue. Can you share it with us? If you want to keep it private feel free to message me on the Forums.

Thank You -

Ketchum

Thanks for the reply, .

  1. After some more exploration, I should clarify some things. I discovered that my lightmaps were not actually reduced in quality. Eye Adaptation is the biggest thing missing, and that helped to wash out any splotchiness in my existing lighting. So all I’m missing is Eye Adaptation and Screen Space Reflections.

  2. It turns out that these lighting features are missing from ALL my Unreal projects, including the Architecture and Couch Knights scenes that function similarly to mine. For this reason, it’s probably not worth it to send you my specific scene, since it is not the anomaly.

Again, I have a Windows build of this game that works fine, it’s just all my editing projects that have this disabled. Like I mentioned, I installed UE4 on this comp just a day before discovering this problem, and I haven’t touched any .ini files. Where should I look for a problem? Thanks.

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Hey StephaBon -

Can you go under Quick Settings >> Engine Scalability Settings >> Make sure that everything is set to EPIC? If it is go under Show >> Post Processing and ensure that your settings are checked true.

Thank You

Ketchum

Solved it! Because no one answered for a day, I had posted in the Forums, where Tim Hobson realized what was wrong. (Eye Adaptation and Screen-Space Reflections not working on my computer. - Rendering - Epic Developer Community Forums)

My work computer has a slightly older graphics card, and I didn’t realize that Unreal Engine modified it’s graphical settings based on how much your computer could theoretically handle. Under the quick settings, I had to change the Engine Scalability settings back to high. It was only previewing what would be available on weaker platforms.

oops, you posted right as I was answering. You are correct! It had automatically set scalability to Medium. Thanks for your help!