Animating using matinee and lighting
ngon master
I just have some questions after animating a fan using matinee last night.
From what I understood I had to convert the static mesh to a mover in order to get matinee to animate it. But when I convert it the lighting becomes a lot more harsh (none of the lighting is baked, I'm using a dominant direction light with one of the default scenes, the shadows are cooler. Is there anyway to improve the lighting on movers? or any other type of object I can make the fan?
From what I understood I had to convert the static mesh to a mover in order to get matinee to animate it. But when I convert it the lighting becomes a lot more harsh (none of the lighting is baked, I'm using a dominant direction light with one of the default scenes, the shadows are cooler. Is there anyway to improve the lighting on movers? or any other type of object I can make the fan?
Replies
I wanted lighting on a mover, D, to match lighting on a static mesh without baked lighting, C. The solution I came up with is a mover with 2 point lights, B.
I figured out through trial and error the only difference between the lighting settings was the precomputed shadows, and that precomputed shadows do not work on movers ((A vs D) precomputed shadows on a mover looks like an equally lit blue-ish fan). The best solution I could come up with was to add 2 point lights that only effect the mover fan, and adjust the color and location to match the environmental lighting it was getting with the precomputed shadows. It is not a perfect match, but is 90% there and no one would notice the difference.
You can actually bake shadows down on movers, but it would produce awful results on your windmill. The shadows would spin around on your mesh and look silly. Here's some check boxes to take a look at when you are dealing with dynamic objects:
Use precomputed shadows: off
This'll bake lights onto your object. Needless to say, make sure this is off.
Synthesize SHLight: on
This will attempt to use Spherical Harmonics -- it generally increases the quality of your lighting and makes some cool bounce light.
Use Boolean Environment Shadowing: off
UDK uses two lighting models, one for lit objects and one for objects in shadow. This will make your object use the expensive (but nice looking) shadowed lighting model.
Other tips -- the dynamic object (mover) is being lit solely by your single dynamic light. I like to throw an ambient light in the scene to correct the super black shadows. Just make sure you take the area light out of the static channel and put it in the dynamic channel. This will ensure it only affects your dynamic objects. Change the light intensity way down -- like .1 or so.
Good luck! Hope this helps!