Screen Dump Won't Capture Light Shaft's Effect?

HakiMaterial

Right, so, I'm trying to capture a small video of my environment in UDK. The weird thing I noticed is the screen dumps wouldn't capture the light shaft's effects from my dd light when I start up the UDK.exe shortcut to record frame dumps in game. I'm wondering if I forgot to add something to the command line in the UDK.exe shortcuts property. So far I have this:

UDK.exe Environment -BENCHMARK -MAXQUALITYMODE -NOTEXTURESTREAMING -DUMPMOVIE -FPS=30 -ResX=320 -ResY=180

My light shaft effects show up fine in the editor and game mode in the editor but not when I'm trying to grab the movie dumps.

Hourences

Do they show up in the game without the dumpmovie mode? And in game I mean not running the editor at all, just the stand alone game.

Because the editor runs things differently from the game (it can be more sensitive to things it doesn't like), so narrow it down if it is that, or if it is the actual lightshafts just not supporting dumpmovie mode.

HakiMaterial

I took your advice and debugged it a bit to find out what the problem was. It seems like the light shaft's effect does work only with the sky domes that epic provides on start up. It doesn't work with my sky dome so I'm guessing it's got to do with the material shader that epic created. I'm a bit lost in their shader network but was wondering how they got it to interact with the dd light like they did. When I rotate the ddl the sun also rotates in their skydome. I'm a bit confused as to what part of the shader does that and allows the shaft to appear without messing up the shader.

Ace-Angel

I don't think shafts have anything to do with the dome, they're a post-process effect.

Are you sure your 'light' parts of your dome are strong enough to cast the rays? Or that you have a sun disk that followed where light vector in the scene?

Shafts need a glowing light source to be cast, if you don't have one, that nothing can be done about it. Try and use one of Epics already created materials and just change around the textures from the Instance if it's all too much for you.

Hourences

Yeah, it is not the dome. At best it is lack of emissive parts of whatever sky you got. Try to place a giant glowing ball in there for a moment or such.

Be aware that lightshafts may not appear on anything but dominant or moveable lights. Other types may show them in the editor but may ultimately not work.

HakiMaterial

Alright, so I've played around with epic's main sky shader settings and compared it to my shader's settings and it turns out I had it on additive instead of opaque and that's why the light shaft's weren't showing up. Thanks a lot Hourences and Ace-Angel! You guys are super!