Sunlight in Unreal2k4?

erik!

I need a good way to do sunlight in Unreal. What I've got right now with the standard Unreal Sunlight is meh, the shadows are black. I know one way to fix that is to throw in another sunlight in the opposite direction to dim the shadows, but that's not working for me. Its casting shadows in the opposite direction of my original sunlight. I tried declaring zones and setting an ambient color, but that doesn't look too hot. It's ok, but not what I'd like in the final level. Is there a way to turn shadows offs on certain lights in Unreal? Someone told there is an option, but failed to explain where. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

FunkaDelicDass

Unfortunately there's not an easy fix. The ambient light in zones can help quite a bit so I wouldn't give up on that so easily, although I know it can be a pain to set up. A combination of ambient light and smaller lights placed in shadow areas can help greatly. Sunlight shadows are always black, so droppping in some faint colored light in those areas makes the lighting more believable anyways. Just remember: cool lighting = warm shadows, warm lighting = cool shadows.

Jesse Moody

i have used the unreal 2k4 engine quite a bit with stuff. while the black shadows from the sunlight are not the best results using the ambient light settings, adding more lights that are softer to add a feeling of bounce light throughout the level will help you get your results. lighting is a long and tedious part of any level design. You just gotta keep plugging away. There are also things you can do with baking your lighting into textures, vertex lighting / painting, and quite a few other things that unreal does that really help things. Best suggestion is open up one of their maps or a mods maps and look at how they do things. The resources are there you just need to use them.

Also check out the Unreal Developers Network. Epic has provided an incredible resource to help you with your development.

gamedev

Most outdoor maps use a sun light (and skybox w/ a fake backdrop setup) for directional shadows and then use the ambient brightness under 'Zone Light' in the Level Properties panel (press F6) to remove the black black shadows.

I don't believe you can turn off shadow casting for lights, but you can turn off shadow casting for static meshes by pressing F4 to bring up the static meshes property window and then under 'Display', set bShadowCast to false.

More info on lights can be found on the UDN as mentioned -
http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/TypesOfLights.html

Tulkamir

Ambient lights? People actually use them?

I've always found that ambient lights typically suck suck, and use them as little as possible. If you need to use a light use spotlights. I've found that a combo of 3 sunlights, 1 main bright one with two dim ones of the opposite temperature pointed upwards and towards the main light can get a nice effect. Then if you have any little area's needing a bump in lighting throw in some spotlights as needed.

Jesse Moody

Gamedev (Tyler) has another good option I forgot to mention. This can be used on a lot of things that shouldn't cast shadows (glass planes, windows, etc).

Also the 3 sunlights is a method I have used as well and it works nicely. Acts like bounce light if you can get it set right and balances out the shadows.

I have also used spot lights as well. I think it really depends on the lighting you need / want.

erik!

Thanks for the feedback guys, much appreciated. I figure I'll have a couple three sunlights and little lights here and there to simulate bounce lighting. I may not end up doing the lighting myself since it's a team project, but I wanted to know what our options were. Again, thanks for the info.