Vast discrepancies between UE5 editor view, camera view and Lume Pad

[mbecker (Michael Becker)]

Hi folks,

Finally got a chance to take the UE5 plugin for a spin. Great work streamlining the installation! Aside from the usual UE/Android friction, things were mostly fine on the Leia plugin side.

I’m using the exampleBP and running into wild discrepancies between what I think the scene should look like, and what it does in fact end up looking like. This is especially noticeable with environmental and atmospheric effects and lighting. As an example, here’s a scene in the editor:

And here it is on the lume pad:

Note the utter absence of SkyAtmosphere and the different light shade of the cube.
Another issue, which might be semi-related if not totally the same thing, is the completely unpredictable lighting behavior between the editor, the camera preview, and the actual lume pad. Case in point - editor:

Camera preview (i.e when hitting play):

And Lume Pad view, which impressively enough, resembles neither:

What’s going on here? This kind of unpredictable behavior is frustrating and extremely challenging to dev and design around. Are there steps I could take to mitigate and/or plan for this? I must admit I’ve worked on the Unity side quite a bit and recall a near 1-1 look identity between on-screen and on-pad (although, then again, Unity doesn’t boast the visual features that UE5 does).

Any/all advice would be greatly appreciated; thanks.

[Lee_N (Lee Nagar)]

Hi Michael,

The first issue w/ the bubbles It looks like there’s a discrepency with your FOV and/or near/far clip planes.

The second i cant say for certain, looks like perhaps you’re using features that android is struggling with.

1. Can you disable/remove the leiacamera from scene, and run the game normally on android, does it produce results youre expecting? UE5 defaults to vulkan and that could be giving you stranger results than expected.

2. if you can provide a very simple project/scene we can take a look

[wendysarrett]

That’s interesting that you mention vulcan…I didn’t bother unchecking it…I’m going to see what the difference, if any is. Also I did find a way to use the regular camera by having the pawn take control of it immediately upon starting. On thing I did notice is when I build the demo example I get an error on the screen that is not clear enough to see in addition the fact there isn’t a moving pawn causes a warning

[mbecker (Michael Becker)]

thanks, @Lee_N .

I hear you about potential built-in discrepancies but they’re far worse with the leia camera - looks like exposure is completely off, at the very least. Look at a side-by-side comparison of the exact same scene on screen and on device:
Regular, out-of-the-box cam:

Leia cam from the example BP - note that the main problem is with the editor preview, but everything still looks pretty washed and, to be honest, terrible on device:

Wasn’t sure how to grab an on-device scshot (regular android shortcuts didn’t seem to work) but this photo is a fairly accurate representation of the lighting situation:

While not as overblown as the in-editor preview, it’s still very problematic. I should mention the sample scenes suffer from the same artifact (at least the side scroller one) - it’s visible everywhere I’ve tried. While Unity has a near one-to-one identity from the editor, cam to the screen, it’s very much not the case in Unreal.

re. near and far clip planes - in Unreal Engine, those settings are project-wide and not easily settable on a per camera basis (see for example this thread). Furthermore far clip doesn’t seem to be settable at all. Unless something is happening with LeiaCam under the hood, I doubt those settings are different.

Switching from Vulkan back to OpenGL makes things worse, actually. Same scene - the in-editor artifacts are different (borderline glitch art, really), and the scene on-device is severely underlit:

@wendysarrett - curious about your results with OpenGL. I, too, see the warning you mention and can’t read it either (only happens on-device, and only occasionally. Maybe related to rebuilding lighting although currently all of mine are dynamic)

Here’s my project in case you want to repro, but anyone should be able to repro this issue with any project; This is default behavior.

To provide some unsolicited product feedback: these discrepancies, for me at least, make the unreal plugin in its current state a nonstarter. The out-of-the-box visual fidelity (or lack thereof) is simply incomparable to Unity’s, and I’m not sure how much of this can be solved with tweaking camera features, PP settings, etc. At the very least I’d take a look at the exposure problem, which makes it near impossible to tell what’s going on in the scene especially in cases of - I believe - any kind of ambient lighting or global illumination, as opposed to singular light sources.

Thanks!