yes I see the results in cryengine but atm I do my work in Unreal so i just keep pushing it I will try with decals, but the leaves are moving (panner).
Hello, i'am doing some vegetation stuff in Unreal atm (tropical island). So my textures rely on transparency all the time. The that the shadows casted by those textures dont take into account the trasparency.
Right now I have one solution wich is to convert the mest to a mover.
But what if I have a whole jungle full of transparency? Do you guys/girls have another solution.
Thanks .
Ahh sorry but currently the retail version of UT3 does not support baked transparency like you are wanting. But the most current dev version of Unreal allows for it.
Their new engine supports transparency channels. However, we wont get it untill they release GOW2 for PC... (If they plan on doing that in the first place). They will also have the AO feature in their new engine build... i can't WAIT for it.
Their new engine supports transparency channels. However, we wont get it untill they release GOW2 for PC... (If they plan on doing that in the first place). They will also have the AO feature in their new engine build... i can't WAIT for it.
The new AO is okay not really all that great...It has some issue's being that it's a post process effect but Lightmass is the shiznit!!!
yay ao as a postprocess sound like it will work really well with softalphas
anyways we would love to get out hands on the new lighting system, would make a lot of things waaaay easier
I'm trying to create a custom UI scene for a team prototype we're doing for class. Although I believe I may have some of the most basic of basics down I still have a few questions. My main question is that if I have several different images to make up an inventory (the inventory holder, and some items to go in it) how do I do the scripting to allow the items to pop up on the holder after picking them up during gameplay? Also, if we create several states for the healthbar to show it decreasing during gameplay how do we go about scripting that?
man i have biiiig shadow problem, somehow they are totally fucked up in the editor, not ingame but they are still annoying...
already deleted all inis in the hope its something with shadowsettings in the inis but nope, thats not it... it just appeared and i dunno what it is causing
man i have biiiig shadow problem, somehow they are totally fucked up in the editor, not ingame but they are still annoying...
already deleted all inis in the hope its something with shadowsettings in the inis but nope, thats not it... it just appeared and i dunno what it is causing
They looked the same way for me when I opened up the Airborn editor you included in the release package.
Yes lightmass is the hotness and the new content browser rocks
I'm in disagreement.
Lightmass would be great if you could see the results when you are working on lighting, but as it is, it seems as soon as you bake you get a wildly different result as to what you see before baked and computed etc. As opposed to the old system, which was only fairly different. It brings some nice features, but I found some of it not too useful given the time it adds to baking (not taking in to account network rendering, which is one of the aforementioned nice features.)
As for content browser, I just do not like change. I'm just not sold on the presentation of it, I think.
They looked the same way for me when I opened up the Airborn editor you included in the release package.
O_O the only thing i changed on this version the last days was building the lights, but can that really change the light in all editor windows? o.o
also when i rotate the light it doesn't changea thing, but i get the lighiting needs to be rebuilt stuff, so its definitely not the lightsource, damn what the hell went wrong
also its really just in the editor, i tested everything with the light but it doesn't change
I have been having some troubles with a custom particle system. I created a new emitter, saved my package, saved my level, placed the emitter, then played it and I was able to see the particle just fine. Then I placed a few more (placed, not alt dragged out copies) and saved then tried to play it again. This time either one or none of the particle systems would show up. They all still show up fine in the editor viewport though. Any thoughts?
Is there any way to script in kismet one trigger to trigger different events based on how many times you activate it? For example, the first time triggers a certain event, the second time triggers a different event...
Lightmass would be great if you could see the results when you are working on lighting, but as it is, it seems as soon as you bake you get a wildly different result as to what you see before baked and computed etc. As opposed to the old system, which was only fairly different. It brings some nice features, but I found some of it not too useful given the time it adds to baking (not taking in to account network rendering, which is one of the aforementioned nice features.)
As for content browser, I just do not like change. I'm just not sold on the presentation of it, I think.
Ah you just need to get used to using LightMass(LM) as it is far superior to the old system. We had some problems getting the whole thing up and running here but as soon as we started to understand how to actually use LM correctly the results where amazing....
LM will give you results that are far superior to anything the stock unreal light build can provid. It still is using a baked and computed lighting system its just far better. But I will say that I am very suprised that it is CPU bound and not GPU bound as GPU's have way more processing power.
Oh I've used it
It's superior for some things but not all. The main flaw/offput for me is not being able to see what you are doing, the bounce just kills your authorial control once built.
I think I will give it a go on a personal scene soon though to make sure. I just do not think it is the second coming of jesus for lighting, at all.
You should really put some time into experimenting with Lightmass, I mean the complaints you giving are pretty much standard for any lighting system that uses indirect lighting...MentalRay, RenderMan, VRay...they all look different when you render because it's not trivial to preview indirect lighting dynamically.
If your studio is set up with Swarm you should be able to do preview builds of small areas in a matter of minutes or less, if not then there's a problem.
I don't think people are saying it's the second coming of Jesus, it's just a matter of UE3 having lighting features that people are used to having with tools like MentalRay, Vray, Renderman and other indirect lighting solutions.
I don't think people are saying it's the second coming of Jesus, it's just a matter of UE3 having lighting features that people are used to having with tools like MentalRay, Vray, Renderman and other indirect lighting solutions.
? Do you think that it doesn't? Granted it doesn't utilize photometric lights because everything is currently baked down to LDR but are there features missing that you think an indirect lighting solution should have?
? Do you think that it doesn't? Granted it doesn't utilize photometric lights because everything is currently baked down to LDR but are there features missing that you think an indirect lighting solution should have?
Sorry I should have edited my quote to the only show the second coming of Jesus part...I thought that was really funny...But I love LM, it's the bee's knees man!
You should really put some time into experimenting with Lightmass, I mean the complaints you giving are pretty much standard for any lighting system that uses indirect lighting...MentalRay, RenderMan, VRay...they all look different when you render because it's not trivial to preview indirect lighting dynamically.
If your studio is set up with Swarm you should be able to do preview builds of small areas in a matter of minutes or less, if not then there's a problem.
I don't think people are saying it's the second coming of Jesus, it's just a matter of UE3 having lighting features that people are used to having with tools like MentalRay, Vray, Renderman and other indirect lighting solutions.
from last paragraph to first
That's just the vibe I've been getting from some people man, both on internet forums and at work, some people are beyond hyped about it is all. I have experimented with lightmass, quite a bit... I dont know. its maybe just me, or the lighting approach. As I say, I'm going to give it a go on a personal project to have a leisurely walk through it.
Good points about the realtime preview but unfortunately for me its a breaker, just because lighting build times can be quite long anyway, and to have to tweak one or two lights and rebuild because somethings bouncing too much, wasn't too appealing to me. Spose thats as much my fault/approach as it is anything else, mind. The ability to bake AO has admittedly got me excited though.
I'm not knocking UE3 though, I love it!
As an aside, I thought Renderman had a pretty close preview of what you were getting?
I'm trying to create a custom UI scene for a team prototype we're doing for class. Although I believe I may have some of the most basic of basics down I still have a few questions. My main question is that if I have several different images to make up an inventory (the inventory holder, and some items to go in it) how do I do the scripting to allow the items to pop up on the holder after picking them up during gameplay? Also, if we create several states for the healthbar to show it decreasing during gameplay how do we go about scripting that?
I cant fully answer this megamoogle, since i do not script the huds/uis, but can try to help
If you are using Canvas to draw elements on the HUD (not using a UI scene), you can do the "UV's" of the texture in script, and reference them that way. Use photoshop's slice tool to find the top, left, width and height (U, V, UL, VL).
You could also create a bunch of individual icons and texture swap in script. You could create your inventory screen with all the image widgets you need, and swap textures/styles into the item widget as needed, and a blank image when it is empty.
IE, if you have 16 inventory slots, you'll need 16 widgets in the UI scene that qualify as those images. Name them uniquely (imgInventory0-15) so you can pick them out in script, and from there you can assign a texture to them as they're aquired. The default imgInventory# widget should be blank, or some sort of default image, and make it blank in script to ensure you have empty slots
I'm getting ready to dip into PostProcess effects in UED. How in the hell do I change the default one to the one I made so I can see in the editor? I tried changing the line in the *.ini file. No luck.
Lamont there's two sections to replace the PPE in the engine.ini file:
[Engine.Engine]
[UnrealEd.UnrealEdEngine]
It could just be the wrong .ini file too. What are you planning on doing withe the PPE? A lot of tweaks can just be altered in the World Settings or creating a PostProcessVolume that encompasses part/all of the level.
Lamont. I ended up playing with this for some prototype stuff to create a pretty stylized post process look. Kind of like the red/black Gears 2 trailer had.
It ended up coming down to scripting, watching some of the tutorial that 3d buzz did a while back and just messing with things. So it basically created a whole new post process node to replace the older one.
I'm sure there were other ways but this is just how I ended up doing it.
Then once that was done I created new materials that I used as the post process effect.
Results were pretty cool. Still trying new things and messing with things.
I figured out why there aren't many people doing this. UED relies on the default PPE for everything in game, and if I do make one, then no one else can see it because I'd have to send the ini file to them. UED doesn't like changing the default PPE it seems. It needs to be there. Also UED bitched at me about it.
Or you set it in Kismet and use it like a Mutator, so I'll go that route.
Lamont: Yeah thats why you need to do the scripting stuff but then you will need to do a lot more then just send a map out. I don't know of any way of embedding it into a map or package since the code has to get compiled.
hey guys, I'm kind of new to materials but now I want to try and make a material that has a slight opacity, and then blurs anything that stands behind it, could someone explain me how I would have to do that?
you might even be able to exploit UE3 here, you know. Shadows tend to cast to infinity and even on backfaces of objects, its a bug I've tried to conquer a few times but you might be able to use it to your advantage. Just give it a go, with a light cast shadows from a character and check out the outer faces, theres a chance it might have received shadows anyway.
hey guys, I'm kind of new to materials but now I want to try and make a material that has a slight opacity, and then blurs anything that stands behind it, could someone explain me how I would have to do that?
you cant "Blur" anything behind it, I mean you could but you'd have to have access to the source code. The way you would do it is expose the blur kernal (the full screen image that's blurred for bloom and DOF) and lerp that in your material. As it stands right now there's no access to this on the content side of things.
word
in reality itll probably just look like a bug.
OP what youd want to do is to create an unlit translucency material
set opacity to whatver (constant 1 maybe set at 0.5???)
Then take a scenetexturesample node and use the zbuffer (Alpha channel) as your emissive result, probably clamp out some highs so you only get the dark shadows, then you are going to want to blur that in the same way described earlier in this thread.
Edit: So I don't look like a total cock, to blur things without access to the proper way of blurring, you have to take 4/8 samples, nudge them in every possible direction by a set amount and then combine them all back together. It should look relatively blurred, but the higher your nudging the more obviously unblurred they look.
It's quite a complex effect if you are just starting out with materials though and quite expensive anyway. And i forget if SceneTextureSample has been opened in retail builds (UT3, GOW) in the material editor, I thought it was a relatively new thing but maybe not.
you mean put the grascale image in the Distortion??, what Im actually trying to achieve is a tent at night effect like this:
would it be possible to make such a tent effect with a light in it, and then when a character walks in the tent you see the shadow on the outside?
I know you cannot have real-time shadows on materials with opacity, but maybe this could be faked somehow without using opacity??
You can have real time shadows on materials with opacity you need to change your light to modulate better so that the shadow will show up*. However with modulate better your shadows are going to cast through everything so you might get shadows on objects that you don't want the shadow to go on.
As for your tent you should use the translucent node in the material editor and then using an gray scale image as a mask to define that amount of light that will be emitted through the material. Black = full light though White = no light coming though.
*I am not sure if UT3 has this option but the version I do at work does and this is how I went about fixing issue like this.
From what I remember w/out the editor open the only materials that will accept opacity are the ones set to Mask with modulate. Mask is not a blended alpha and will cast and receive shadows.
Im not sure if this has been covered here already but after much pulling of hair and frustration on my part, the lovely chap Riki from Eat3d suggested a part solution for the texture compression problems within UE.
Change the LODGroup in the texture properties window within the generic browser from World to UI and they appear in all their uncompressed glory.
By part solution i mean that obviously this wouldn't be any good for production but its great for portfolio shots
Here is a before and after from within the editor (the quality is slightly reduced due to being a .gif)
2048 is quite large for a lightmap, and IMHO not very practical for real ingame usage unless your mesh is gigantic and unique. If it's for a portfolio piece or cut scene it may not matter as much.
I can't say for sure but I think a good method is to try and calculate how much texture budget you have for lightmaps in your scene then divide it up according to how many meshes you will have in the level and how much detail you need for each mesh. Large mesh or closer to camera = higher resolution.
Here's a nice light mapping tutorial by Stephen Jameson, it goes into depth about setting up optimal lightmap UVs for low resolution lightmaps.
Ben thats a pretty good tutorial except in the latest builds of unreal with lightmass and all that you don't need to have the padding on the edges of the maps anymore.
I guess you're still using the retail version Unreal Tournament 3 like me? Then in general I would say using the diffuse UVs for lightmap UVs is a bad idea because of the padding issue with lightmap UVs.
Also if you've got any mirrored UVs that can cause some issues as well (this was discussed a couple of pages back in this thread).
Overlapping UVs will duplicate the lighting on different parts of the mesh which might or might not be correct.
That link I posted gives a few ideas about how to make better UV layouts for lightmap UV sets.
Oh... It would be great if non-square texture sizes were allowed for lightmaps too. I hope Epic will release a new build of the engine to the public in the future, I'd love to play with lightmass and some of the newer material nodes.
Hi everyone,
My question regards UnrealScript, and Kismet.
I am wondering if it is possible to emulate Shadow Complex, by this I mean:
- side scrolling camera that follows the player
- limit the players movement to left and right only
- custom script for movement abilities (this is the least important)
I am curious if their are similar tuts around that are capable of this or something like it? Or maybe someone can point me in the right direction?
Entirely possible with unrealscript yes. And theres a mod that does just that even. Google for UT3 UT2D.
Afaik there are no tutorials out there that focus on how to set this kind of game up though.
__________________________________________
I am hard at work updating my website. I introduced a snippet system for one, where you can ctrl+c kismet and level bits on the website, and then directly ctrl+v them into the editor.
So for example on my website is an elevator setup. You copy it. You paste it into the editor, and you got a working elevator!
Basic rooms and terrains. Many gameplay Kismet things. Also orbitting camera setups amd setups that remove the hud and all weapons from the player, probably handy if you want to showcase a model.
Official release and announcement following in a while, together with a slew of other things including new tutorials and a revamped job section focusing entirely on Unreal.
Replies
Ahh sorry but currently the retail version of UT3 does not support baked transparency like you are wanting. But the most current dev version of Unreal allows for it.
The new AO is okay not really all that great...It has some issue's being that it's a post process effect but Lightmass is the shiznit!!!
anyways we would love to get out hands on the new lighting system, would make a lot of things waaaay easier
already deleted all inis in the hope its something with shadowsettings in the inis but nope, thats not it... it just appeared and i dunno what it is causing
Yes lightmass is the hotness and the new content browser rocks
gimme!
They looked the same way for me when I opened up the Airborn editor you included in the release package.
Lightmass would be great if you could see the results when you are working on lighting, but as it is, it seems as soon as you bake you get a wildly different result as to what you see before baked and computed etc. As opposed to the old system, which was only fairly different. It brings some nice features, but I found some of it not too useful given the time it adds to baking (not taking in to account network rendering, which is one of the aforementioned nice features.)
As for content browser, I just do not like change. I'm just not sold on the presentation of it, I think.
O_O the only thing i changed on this version the last days was building the lights, but can that really change the light in all editor windows? o.o
also when i rotate the light it doesn't changea thing, but i get the lighiting needs to be rebuilt stuff, so its definitely not the lightsource, damn what the hell went wrong
also its really just in the editor, i tested everything with the light but it doesn't change
Ah you just need to get used to using LightMass(LM) as it is far superior to the old system. We had some problems getting the whole thing up and running here but as soon as we started to understand how to actually use LM correctly the results where amazing....
LM will give you results that are far superior to anything the stock unreal light build can provid. It still is using a baked and computed lighting system its just far better. But I will say that I am very suprised that it is CPU bound and not GPU bound as GPU's have way more processing power.
It's superior for some things but not all. The main flaw/offput for me is not being able to see what you are doing, the bounce just kills your authorial control once built.
I think I will give it a go on a personal scene soon though to make sure. I just do not think it is the second coming of jesus for lighting, at all.
If your studio is set up with Swarm you should be able to do preview builds of small areas in a matter of minutes or less, if not then there's a problem.
I don't think people are saying it's the second coming of Jesus, it's just a matter of UE3 having lighting features that people are used to having with tools like MentalRay, Vray, Renderman and other indirect lighting solutions.
LOL that just made my day....
Sorry I should have edited my quote to the only show the second coming of Jesus part...I thought that was really funny...But I love LM, it's the bee's knees man!
That's just the vibe I've been getting from some people man, both on internet forums and at work, some people are beyond hyped about it is all. I have experimented with lightmass, quite a bit... I dont know. its maybe just me, or the lighting approach. As I say, I'm going to give it a go on a personal project to have a leisurely walk through it.
Good points about the realtime preview but unfortunately for me its a breaker, just because lighting build times can be quite long anyway, and to have to tweak one or two lights and rebuild because somethings bouncing too much, wasn't too appealing to me. Spose thats as much my fault/approach as it is anything else, mind. The ability to bake AO has admittedly got me excited though.
I'm not knocking UE3 though, I love it!
As an aside, I thought Renderman had a pretty close preview of what you were getting?
I cant fully answer this megamoogle, since i do not script the huds/uis, but can try to help
If you are using Canvas to draw elements on the HUD (not using a UI scene), you can do the "UV's" of the texture in script, and reference them that way. Use photoshop's slice tool to find the top, left, width and height (U, V, UL, VL).
You could also create a bunch of individual icons and texture swap in script. You could create your inventory screen with all the image widgets you need, and swap textures/styles into the item widget as needed, and a blank image when it is empty.
IE, if you have 16 inventory slots, you'll need 16 widgets in the UI scene that qualify as those images. Name them uniquely (imgInventory0-15) so you can pick them out in script, and from there you can assign a texture to them as they're aquired. The default imgInventory# widget should be blank, or some sort of default image, and make it blank in script to ensure you have empty slots
[Engine.Engine]
[UnrealEd.UnrealEdEngine]
It could just be the wrong .ini file too. What are you planning on doing withe the PPE? A lot of tweaks can just be altered in the World Settings or creating a PostProcessVolume that encompasses part/all of the level.
It ended up coming down to scripting, watching some of the tutorial that 3d buzz did a while back and just messing with things. So it basically created a whole new post process node to replace the older one.
I'm sure there were other ways but this is just how I ended up doing it.
Then once that was done I created new materials that I used as the post process effect.
Results were pretty cool. Still trying new things and messing with things.
@J.Moody - Scripting? 3DBuzz? I'll go take a gander. And yeah, I just wanna mess with something and see what happens
Or you set it in Kismet and use it like a Mutator, so I'll go that route.
would it be possible to make such a tent effect with a light in it, and then when a character walks in the tent you see the shadow on the outside?
I know you cannot have real-time shadows on materials with opacity, but maybe this could be faked somehow without using opacity??
i always tend to build stuff to hide that effect or hope that no one will see it
i think in the latest build this one is fixed, i read something in udn about clipping distances for shadows or something like this
in reality itll probably just look like a bug.
OP what youd want to do is to create an unlit translucency material
set opacity to whatver (constant 1 maybe set at 0.5???)
Then take a scenetexturesample node and use the zbuffer (Alpha channel) as your emissive result, probably clamp out some highs so you only get the dark shadows, then you are going to want to blur that in the same way described earlier in this thread.
Edit: So I don't look like a total cock, to blur things without access to the proper way of blurring, you have to take 4/8 samples, nudge them in every possible direction by a set amount and then combine them all back together. It should look relatively blurred, but the higher your nudging the more obviously unblurred they look.
It's quite a complex effect if you are just starting out with materials though and quite expensive anyway. And i forget if SceneTextureSample has been opened in retail builds (UT3, GOW) in the material editor, I thought it was a relatively new thing but maybe not.
Yeah! I knew it started with a D.
You can have real time shadows on materials with opacity you need to change your light to modulate better so that the shadow will show up*. However with modulate better your shadows are going to cast through everything so you might get shadows on objects that you don't want the shadow to go on.
As for your tent you should use the translucent node in the material editor and then using an gray scale image as a mask to define that amount of light that will be emitted through the material. Black = full light though White = no light coming though.
*I am not sure if UT3 has this option but the version I do at work does and this is how I went about fixing issue like this.
Change the LODGroup in the texture properties window within the generic browser from World to UI and they appear in all their uncompressed glory.
By part solution i mean that obviously this wouldn't be any good for production but its great for portfolio shots
Here is a before and after from within the editor (the quality is slightly reduced due to being a .gif)
I can't say for sure but I think a good method is to try and calculate how much texture budget you have for lightmaps in your scene then divide it up according to how many meshes you will have in the level and how much detail you need for each mesh. Large mesh or closer to camera = higher resolution.
Here's a nice light mapping tutorial by Stephen Jameson, it goes into depth about setting up optimal lightmap UVs for low resolution lightmaps.
http://stephenjameson.com/tutorials/...-uvs-tutorial/
That's awesome, the padding wastes so much space.
@skayne:
Modulated Shadows
I guess you're still using the retail version Unreal Tournament 3 like me? Then in general I would say using the diffuse UVs for lightmap UVs is a bad idea because of the padding issue with lightmap UVs.
Also if you've got any mirrored UVs that can cause some issues as well (this was discussed a couple of pages back in this thread).
Overlapping UVs will duplicate the lighting on different parts of the mesh which might or might not be correct.
That link I posted gives a few ideas about how to make better UV layouts for lightmap UV sets.
My question regards UnrealScript, and Kismet.
I am wondering if it is possible to emulate Shadow Complex, by this I mean:
- side scrolling camera that follows the player
- limit the players movement to left and right only
- custom script for movement abilities (this is the least important)
I am curious if their are similar tuts around that are capable of this or something like it? Or maybe someone can point me in the right direction?
Thanks in advance!
Afaik there are no tutorials out there that focus on how to set this kind of game up though.
__________________________________________
I am hard at work updating my website. I introduced a snippet system for one, where you can ctrl+c kismet and level bits on the website, and then directly ctrl+v them into the editor.
So for example on my website is an elevator setup. You copy it. You paste it into the editor, and you got a working elevator!
http://www.hourences.com/book/snippetsindex.htm
Basic rooms and terrains. Many gameplay Kismet things. Also orbitting camera setups amd setups that remove the hud and all weapons from the player, probably handy if you want to showcase a model.
Official release and announcement following in a while, together with a slew of other things including new tutorials and a revamped job section focusing entirely on Unreal.