Skylight bug in matinee, any workaround?

ktacreations

Trying to set up a day-night cycle in UDK and it looks great in the matinee editor... But when I go to the actual game, the skylight is being a total dick and wont animate. Skylight toggleable doesn't do anything either. I asked on the UDK forums and the best answer I got was that it is a bug and also to "think outside the box."

Well I'm at a loss here. Who do I have to shank do get this working? I will seriously paypal like 20 bucks to whomever gives me a working solution to this cause its holding up my whole project.

Thanks guys!

sprunghunt

the way I would do this is not to animate the skylight at all. What you do is light your scene halfway between day and night - have a look at day for night hollywood films for reference - then you use animated post processing and material shifts to do the day to night transition.

r4ptur3

convert your dominantDirectionalLight a dominantDirectionLightMoveable and hook it up to the "Target" of the Set Actor Location node. Uncheck "set location" in the Set Actor Location node properties. Crude, but tested and works.


When the level loads it'll add a value of 100 to a float variable. That variable is then fed into the X, Y, and Z of a Vector. The vector then drives the light's rotation. The chain then waits one one hundredth of a second and repeats all over again, adding 100 to the rotation vector.

Keep in mind Unreal doesn't use degrees when you manually do rotation like this. One degree is actually a value of 182.044. If you want the light to rotate on one axis just unplug two of the three values feeding into the Set Vector Components node. Likewise, you can slow the rotation down by altering the value going into the Add Float Node.

If you want to see a physical representation of what the chain is doing just convert the cube in the default level to a mover and hook it up to the Target of the Set Actor Location node.

20 bucks heyo!!!! j/k keep rockin' out in UDK. The more you know the stronger we all get as a community.

ktacreations

Hey guys thanks for replying!

Sprunghunt - imma try that animated post process thing next. So far though the issue is that I DO want bottom-up lighting in the day to simulate bounce light, but none at night to get the shadows back to really dark. I could try some kind of color shift thing in the post process maybe? I'll try it.

r4pture - Oh dude I'm trying to animate the intesity and color of a skylight, I've already got the domDirectional rotating fine. Many thanks though for that tutorial i didnt know any of that before!

r4ptur3

AH! Gotcha. I was able to get it to work using both a dominantDirectionLightMoveable and a SkyLightToggleable. Make sure the SkyLightToggleable has its physics set to "interpolating". You can find this in it's properties by searching for "phys". Next, make a Matinee and an new lighting group (right click on the left --> new lighting group). Make two keys for light color and set the last one to something obnoxious like 1, 0, 0 red. Lastly, hook a Level Loaded node up to the "play" of the Matinee. Both lights worked fine in editor and in game. I think the key you were missing was phys interpolating.

Hope this helps!

ktacreations

SkylightTogglable + PhysInterpolating was the magic combo but now the one reason I was using the skylight still wont animate and that's to fade up and down the lower brightness / lower color. Im wondering if Ill just have to remove that and use another animated directional with no shadows, opposing the sun, and just pray no weird specular artifacts happen. This is driving me insane why the hell is the simplest light the one with all the broken features.

anyway many thanks again!

r4ptur3

yeah, it looks like there is no way to modify those values without making some custom kismet nodes or hard coding. you might be able to paste the matinee into a text editor, modify and re-paste back into UDK if you are super resourceful