Two Sky spheres in a level (UE4)

melviso

Hi all,

I was wondering if there is a way to make two sky sphere blueprints to light a level where one is directly visible for the sky with no lighting effect on the level and another that is not visible but lights the level. I want to try out some lighting technique with ue4. Is this possible?

Also, can someone tell me if the pic Koola posted here:https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?58385-Koola-s-stuff/page5
Was tessellation done with Landscape or it was a static mesh imported into ue4 for the ground.

leleuxart

I'm not sure I understand what you mean with the two blueprints for lighting a level through skies. Like cubemaps for image-based lighting? Or? 

For the second one, tessellation/displacement on landscape actors is currently pretty buggy. You could just set up distance-based tessellation with a terrain mesh that was sculpted or created in WM.

melviso

I just realized..That's what color of skylight is for. No worries..mate. Just figured it out.

What if I sculpted a mesh in Mudbox/Zbrush? I am guessing I need to bake out the displacement map to use as a height map after importing the low res mesh in UE4. Why not just procedural foilage for the rocks and stones but he uses tessellation?

melviso

Guys, I have a problem. I am trying out lighting a scene with using a movable sun(direct light) which will create dynamic shadows with a movable skylight like Koola's ue4 scenes. Problem is the cascaded shadow maps are quite a problem as they look good from a certain camera distance but look bad if I move the camera closer or further, so I have to tweak the shadows settings again for the sun.

A small scene to experiment with lighting. Haven't used ue4 in a while. I am using the 4.11.2 version. Seems some names and things have changed a bit. Is there a way to get the shadow to look better at any distance and be dynamic? It also looks jagged even though I am using a Geoforce gtx 780m.

leleuxart

Cascaded shadow maps are pretty tricky, because they require a lot of tweaking to get the best settings for the trade off. You'll be sacrificing some quality/accuracy for fully dynamic shadows. Also look at the shadow bias/shadow filter sharpen options in the directional light. If you're getting disconnected shadows, lowering the bias can help and sharpening the shadow can reduce the shadow banding that appears with low bias settings(at the cost of shadow smoothness.) 

If you don't need a fully dynamic light source, look into Stationary lights. You can bake high-res static shadows, and still have cascaded shadow maps up to a certain distance or per-object shadow maps(which are higher res but more expensive). 

melviso

Thanks Leleuxart.

Been experimenting also with Lumberyard as well. Seems Dynamic Lighting is way better and manageable. No problem with distance from the camera as well.

melviso

Hi, sorry for bumping up an older thread. Had to stop using game engines for a while.
Turns out the two sky sphere for ue4 doesn't work after lighting is rebuilt.  Is there a way one can tell the engine to use one sky sphere for lighting the level and use one to just be directly visible with no lighting effects and remains intact after lighting is baked? Like a directly visible only overide?
Thanks

Obscura

Hide the one that you want just visually before you bake and unhide after building. If this doesn't work for some reason, you could place it as movable actor.

melviso

Thanks Obscura, worked perfectly.