Unreal Lights in Reflections

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Unreal Lights in Reflections

Postby joshuamkerr » Tue Nov 30, 2021 9:11 am

joshuamkerr Tue Nov 30, 2021 9:11 am
As it seems to be good practice to set the light sources to a fairly large radius to combat noise I have done so in my scene.
However this makes them very noticeable in reflective materials.

Usually in unreal this is solved with the specular value of the light so I turned that down but this doesn't affect the Octane render. How can I set it so that a light source is not physically visible in reflections through Octane?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cnwGodX4aCCBQ8B2g3hyKeodElmk4Hl4/view?usp=sharing
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Re: Unreal Lights in Reflections

Postby elsksa » Tue Nov 30, 2021 11:42 am

elsksa Tue Nov 30, 2021 11:42 am
Hi,

If the scene has properly been modeled at-scale and the shading is plausible, changing the size of the lights should not be necessary.

To answer your question, I have shared a screenshot, below, from Octane Standalone (which I exclusively use). Does Octane for Unreal Engine has these Visibility options?
octane_lmDHCRsbt5.jpg
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Re: Unreal Lights in Reflections

Postby ChrisHekman » Tue Nov 30, 2021 12:00 pm

ChrisHekman Tue Nov 30, 2021 12:00 pm
joshuamkerr wrote:As it seems to be good practice to set the light sources to a fairly large radius to combat noise I have done so in my scene.
However this makes them very noticeable in reflective materials.


Have you tried AI-Light to reduce noise? It is in the octane kernel.

joshuamkerr wrote:Usually in unreal this is solved with the specular value of the light so I turned that down but this doesn't affect the Octane render.


Octane has an option to turn off specular reflections, but it is binary. Either on or off.
I can add that this gets turned off when the unreal "Specular Scale" is set to 0.
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Re: Unreal Lights in Reflections

Postby joshuamkerr » Tue Nov 30, 2021 12:29 pm

joshuamkerr Tue Nov 30, 2021 12:29 pm
Hi Chris,

Yes I work with the AI light but specular noise is still a problem, however larger light radius and turning down material specular/roughness values seem to be the main solves when using path tracing.

I don't see the specular boolean, is it supposed to be found in the render target? I don't want to loose all specular reflections, just the ones caused by light visibility. Using the specular scale option would be good because you can work on a per-light basis.

Josh
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Re: Unreal Lights in Reflections

Postby joshuamkerr » Tue Nov 30, 2021 1:14 pm

joshuamkerr Tue Nov 30, 2021 1:14 pm
elsksa wrote:Hi,

If the scene has properly been modeled at-scale and the shading is plausible, changing the size of the lights should not be necessary.

To answer your question, I have shared a screenshot, below, from Octane Standalone (which I exclusively use). Does Octane for Unreal Engine has these Visibility options?
octane_lmDHCRsbt5.jpg



Hi Elsksa,

I'm afraid I don't use the standalone Octane version and I don't see this option in the plugin as I'm using native unreal lights.

Love the software and how much work is being put into compatability.
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Re: Unreal Lights in Reflections

Postby ChrisHekman » Tue Nov 30, 2021 1:40 pm

ChrisHekman Tue Nov 30, 2021 1:40 pm
joshuamkerr wrote:
I don't see the specular boolean, is it supposed to be found in the render target? I don't want to loose all specular reflections, just the ones caused by light visibility.


It is currently not an exposed feature to the unreal side ATM. You will need to go to the specific light node in the octane GUI and select its emissive node and set it from there.

joshuamkerr wrote:Using the specular scale option would be good because you can work on a per-light basis.


Ill see if it can add this for the next build.
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Re: Unreal Lights in Reflections

Postby joshuamkerr » Wed Dec 01, 2021 8:05 am

joshuamkerr Wed Dec 01, 2021 8:05 am
That would be amazing to see. Thanks Chris.
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Re: Unreal Lights in Reflections

Postby joshuamkerr » Wed Dec 08, 2021 12:09 pm

joshuamkerr Wed Dec 08, 2021 12:09 pm
Hi Chris,

I was trying to follow your guidance and changing the binary option on lights via the GUI node graph.

Appologies for this but it's my first time looking at the octane GUI and, having already built my scene, the graph editor is incredibly dense. I have linked an image below.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SvWkhm6wOCL8HNapbJAIBI0stEvlGbd6/view?usp=sharing

I have had a look at the documentation but I can't find anything about organising the nodes when they're like the attached image. Is there some search functionality or some way to automatically spread these nodes out because they seem to just be overlapping each other and there must be hundreds.

I'm not sure how I'd go about finding a single light in my unreal scene without spending hours picking through these nodes. Is it suppoised to look like this?
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Re: Unreal Lights in Reflections

Postby ChrisHekman » Wed Dec 08, 2021 3:26 pm

ChrisHekman Wed Dec 08, 2021 3:26 pm
These buttons can auto-layout your nodegraph.
deleteme.png
deleteme.png (19.12 KiB) Viewed 3576 times


The lights themselves are inside nodegraphs called "pointlightx", it might be a bit hard to find the specific light manually, but is definitely possible.
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Re: Unreal Lights in Reflections

Postby joshuamkerr » Thu Dec 09, 2021 8:28 pm

joshuamkerr Thu Dec 09, 2021 8:28 pm
Hi Chris,

this was very helpful and I have managed to drill down to the lights (it took a while).

One last question. I turned off the specular visibility in the emission node in some of the lights to tets it out and it worked, but after closing the GUI the settings have gone back to the way they were before. How can I save the changes that I make to the nodegraph?
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