Materials : Need help with specific emissive look

capone

I'm trying to capture this look, in particular the windows;



So I built a little text asset with a glass box on top. Added vertex colours in 3DSmax and have brought it into Unreal4. Made a 'master' material (pink) and then a instance (blue).



Main questions,

1) Shouldn't I be making the master material grey? Then only bring in colour through the colour parameters that I set up in the instances?

2) I was hoping for the emissive to overpower and glow out of the glass box. I achieve this if I increase emissive in the instance but then I can't see the vertex colouring/gradient.

3) I tried adding some static point lights around it and baked, got some cool results but am worried that having 1000's of these lights in a scene, even static, will kill performance? (this is intended for Oculus, so need 75FPS)

4) Is there a way to turn lights on and off easily like 3dsmaxs light lister? I can hide the symbol but not disable the effect?

5) Any other ideas how to use Unreal4 to add to the original artwork shown? I want to play with a subtle specular perhaps?

Vailias

1.) No. So long as the color is a parameter and that parameter drives the look of the object, then you should be fine having the master with whatever color you want.

2.)For glowing outside, check your post process settings. There should be a bloom threshold in there somewhere. If you lower that you can get glow/bloom with lower emissive vlues.

5.) Consider just doing unlit materials for the glowie bits, have the floor be a black smooth surface so it gets the image based reflections.

capone

Thanks Vaililas. Not sure what you meant with image based reflections. So I checked this out,

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ImageBasedReflections.html



1) It looks like something that would eat up a lot of memory, is it?

2) I want to be able to affect the emissive through triggers (lights turning off as you approach them etc). Can you also affect specific lights within image based reflections?

Vailias

The image based reflections in UE3 weren't actually that expensive.
And, depending on the outcome you want, you could do without them or fake it with geometry and transparency.
The scene gets re-rendered every so often so lighting is affected.

However, you can also directly affect materials via triggers. You can change parameters on a material instance during gameplay. So if you have your materials as an unlit type, have their color be a parameter, then you can trigger the color to black and make the lights appear to turn off.