General Settings
Not every lighting control lives in the Spectral panel. Unreal's lights, mesh components, and materials also determine what gets baked and how the result is displayed. This section explains the settings worth checking alongside Spectral.
Select the actor in the level, then search its Details panel for the setting name. For a Blueprint, select the relevant light or mesh component first. Some controls are under advanced properties or only appear for the appropriate light type and mobility.
Find a setting
| Setting | Use it to |
|---|---|
| Use Area Shadows for Stationary Light | Understand soft baked shadows from Stationary lights and how they differ from PCSS. |
| Use Emissive for Static Lighting | Understand when a glowing material contributes to a bake, including Spectral's GPU bake behavior. |
| Emissive Boost | Adjust a mesh's baked emission without changing how bright its material looks in the game. |
| Source Angle | Change the apparent size of a Directional Light and the softness of supported shadows. |
| Indirect Lighting Intensity | Adjust a light's bounced contribution separately from its direct illumination. |
| Volumetric Scattering Intensity | Adjust a light's contribution to volumetric fog without changing its surface brightness. |
| Sky Light on mobile | Set up a Static Sky Light for Spectral's mobile baked-lighting workflow. |
Baked changes versus live changes
A bake records the lighting at that moment. Changing a light or material afterwards does not rewrite existing lightmaps or probe data. Rebuild the affected lighting with Baker > Bake Lighting, then save the level and its lighting assets.
BakerSome controls also affect live rendering. A Stationary light can change its direct appearance while its old bounced lighting remains baked. Similarly, live fog scattering can change while the probe lighting inside that fog stays unchanged. Each reference page separates these cases.
Keep the camera and exposure consistent, adjust one setting, and compare the same part of the scene. Auto exposure can hide or exaggerate a lighting change.
For project-wide renderer requirements, use Interface > Settings. For material graph controls supplied by the plugin, use Spectral Material Nodes.