The problem is Unreal’s photo realistic tonemapper being the default for post process, and that’s what blows out the values to white when you push the emissive values too high.
I believe this quick tutorial is still applicable for more saturated Unreal post process. While it’s focused on getting a more diffuse hand painted look instead of realistic lighting, the way it handles color helps keep your emissive from getting blown out as well. https://www.artstation.com/artwork/ybrJgR
There’s also some settings for saturation you can mess with, but overall there are lots of people who’ve had the same issue as you with Unreal and emissive, and there’s no real easy or good fix that doesn’t also change what the rest of the scene looks like.
There’s a command somewhere to change to the legacy tone mapper, but I forgot it. Might be able to find it with a bit of digging.
But also, it’s a good idea to learn to work with modern tone mappers, they deal with colors in a significantly more consistent manner than the legacy tone mappers and their color response is usually more physically correct.
But a lot of times people working in stylized effects don’t want a color response that is “more physically correct”. The most desired feature of pushing an emissive color past 1.0 is the same (or very similar) color bloom around the outside of the shape. To work with the default tone mapper and get this same look without losing your color hue or saturation, you usually need to layer a second particle sprite on top using a blurred version of that sprite’s texture at a very low opacity. For complex things this ends up being a ton of extra work, and for things like flipbooks could mean an entirely separate set of textures just for the glows.
I’m legitimately surprised that after all this time, Epic hasn’t put together and offered a second render setup built in mind for devs and studios making stylized games. The amount of work so many studios have put in at the start of a project just to try and counteract the photoreal tone mapper is crazy.
Sure, the filmic tone mapper is probably more physically correct, but art like this isn’t. And then it’s an uphill battle to try and get the same colors and style feel from the fx and other emissive sources.
Plus the command to change to the legacy tone mapper is just for changing it while playing in the editor, correct? I’m not sure if there’s an option to use it outright for an entire project as the default? Similar to running the command to see the game run in Unlit mode or changing the viewport to Unlit. It’s like a temporary preview in that instance, but you would need to do a bunch of extra steps to have your entire game build and play by default as Unlit right?
Not really, the command just switches modes, you can do that for the build too. OR reimplement the legacy tone mapper.
But a lot of times people working in stylized effects don’t want a color response that is “more physically correct”.
Just because they don’t want to doesn’t mean that’s a reasonable limit to set.
Aces tone mapping is becoming standard for a reason. Standardization is valuable so we don’t need to keep relearning how our tone mapper is going to affect our work.
Non-standardized tone mappers do not deal with color in predictable ways, look at the screenshot above my first comment for an example (tone mapper makes cyan core but blue glow)
Other departments also benefit from aces because they can base color response on measurement rather than having to guess, keep levels consistent etc.
Filmic tone mapper is a misnomer, only the default settings are filmic, you can get stylized response out of the aces tonemapper.
Epic hasn’t put together and offered a second render setup
There is absolutely no reason for Epic to roll the clock back 20 years and reimplement outdated tone mapper tech just because a few people get stuck in their old ways…
