Alphas with normal maps and lighting

Reverenddevil

I was wondering when unside UE3 I have an alpha map and switched it to blend mode transluceny and unlit and phogn etc and when I do this all my noormal and bump offset info goes away and my object doesnt use the lights it is just permanently lit. How can I use alpha and keep my alpha info etc? Thanks..

PixelMasher

hey man,

Unreal supports statically lit translucency only, not with dynamic lights (such as material editors viewport)

If you set the transparency setting to translucent and keep the lighting model set to phong it should work. It wont appear correctly in the material editor preview because there is no baked static lighting, but if you were to apply it to a mesh that already has baked static lighting the result should be fine.

so to clarify, you should set the shader up without translucency 1st, bake lighting and then plug in the opacity map. this is because currently UE3 doesnt take the translucency into account when building lighting, hence why it was bullet pointed in their updated tools at GDC.

ImSlightlyBored

if all you've got and want is an alpha map, try just using masked material type
it isn't soft (so any sort of soft edge/translucent materials you want will be eternal fail) but for stuff like cage mesh etc it would be fine. Masked lights fine and generally is a bit cheaper than translucent materials anyway.
PixelMasher, does that trick work with repeated builds; ie do you only have to change mat type once for it to work, or do you have to swap back and forth for every lighting build?

PixelMasher

if you change the lighting the object will go completley black, just like the mat window preview, but if you rebuild lighting it should come back. if it doesnt just redo the steps above.