Tips for Optimizing Your Lighting in Unreal Engine

Today we're looking at some tips and best practices when it comes to optimizing your lighting for Unreal Engine environments that are being used in Virtual Production.

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#unrealengine #tutorial #virtualproduction

[TheFullydiamond]

bro every single problem i’ve been having with my projects have been fixed with just this one video. thank you 😭

[OverJumpRally]

Great video!
I wish there was an option for Emissive material to NOT cast light, just glowing (which is what Emissive did back in UE4, I believe).
Speaking of Light Blockers, you can hide them in-game (with the Hidden in Game flag) and still have them block light by using the "Affect Indirect Lighting While Hidden" turned on. You can see them in Lumen View!
You can also use the same trick for emissive hidden meshes. For example, I needed more light coming from outside but I didn't want to bring up the exposure (because that cause more flickering) so I just threw emissive panels outside.
Oh, another reason why you need those Light Blockers in the first place is because the wall meshes are exposed to the external lighting: basically, Mesh Distance Field would average the light they get from the various light sources, so if your wall is half lit from the outside and half from the inside, it would look weird. If you have a scene where the character can go outside and inside a room, then I suggest to simply split the walls into interiors and exteriors.
Also, I have to point out how UE 5.4 got much better with all these leakage, in fact I ended up deleting most of the Light Blockers I had in my scene.

[dukesofdevon]

Another way to help deal with the 'light leak' issues, avoid planes in the first place - if your walls have some thickness you'll see this has much the same effect as the light blockers but is less work!

[yuniorfrometa]

thanks bro, great value in this tutorial

[blackdoc]

I just want it to be easier to manually set like a cube that a light can affect in Unreal. Imagine if you could have a rect light, no shadows, restricted to a specific room so that there's no bleeding on the other side of the walls. No shadow cost, and it's restricted to the room so it won't bleed.

[peterallely]

Looking forward to the experimental megalights becoming production ready!!

[skol]

Hey, especially overlapping lights are a big issue in terms of performance.

It wouldve been better if you spread out the light sources accordingly so you have a cleaner performance overview, with this setup, you also account the performance drawdown that overlapped lighting generates.

[larryweissenburger]

Great tutorial. your explanation is great. You're easy to understand. Thank you so much. The question I have is if you put multiple cameras in a room, can you control the light sources for each camera separately? so that as you look through each camera to get rendering shots, you can adjust the lighting source to that camera specifically without changing the lighting source that has been set to other cameras. You spend a lot of time getting the light source set up for one camera on one side of the room. Then you switch over to another camera, get the lighting source set up for that camera. Get your shot. But then you want to go back to the other camera, and all the lighting source has been changed, so you have to reset it again. If that makes sense, I think it can be done, but I just haven't found any videos. on YouTube for that.

[Vaibhavnagare-xsvy]

Can You Please tell me how you setup persistent level or any tutorial for that, this is new for me

[mindped]

is there a way to stop emissive materials from contributing to lumen at all? Really gets in the way of making physically accurate lighting settings combined with bloom and all that.