AFAIK light inclusion volumes aren't supported. Static lighting ignores channels and any sort of volume or inclusion settings since it bounces around now. Dynamic moveable lights will still use channels.
Thanks for clearing this up for me Jordan. Was getting frustrated as to to why the inclusion volumes weren't functional when using LightMass (I was under the impression it would still take them into account like if you were using GI and lights in 3ds).
Instead I've gone and taken advantage of the channels in both the lights and the objects I'm trying to light (where the bounce light isn't affecting it enough). So just ticking away on the UnNamed_# channels and linking them up with the meshes I need to light, while at the same time removing tick channels for the newly added lights so they don't affect other objects.
Someone recently PM'd me asking how I sorted the issue, and I gave him some brief directions on how to alter it.
I had to quickly go back through the Eat 3D UDK lighting dvd to get my head straight about how it all works.
What I did was go to FX_HitEffects > UTPostProcess_Console and reduce the occlusion power. Really all those settings in there are what affects the AO and other things in your scene.
Here's a screenshot to show what influences it. Obviously you need to be clicked on the AO Effect at the top with the chain to see everything in the window below.
Edit the Occlusion Power,Scale and Radius until you get the result you desire.
Hate to be a question whore, but anyone seen this on their terrain before? Know any fixes? It looks like it has something to do with the way that patch is being rendered out.....
EDIT: Okay, I think I figured it out. I have quite a few layers on the terrain, and one is a layer that has dead leaves and branches for underneath the trees in my map. I added a normal map to it, and this "artifact" appeared. I unplugged said normal map, and it disappeared. I would love to have the normal map on it, but it's not absolutely essential. Anyone know the technical reason behind this?
Can't seem to get per-pixel collision working at the moment, I turn it on both in the mesh settings from the browser and enable complex collision in the mesh properties in the map but still run straight through it, anyone got the exact settings I need to get this to work as I don't fancy making a collision set for caves.
Talking about shooting or what? If you want collision (objects/physics/characters.. etc..) you have to generate the geometry using UDK or in your application. There are settings for how complex you want it to be in UDK. If you're making things for levels then you need to factor in collision geometry as part of the content creation pipeline. Most of the time, UDK/Unreal collision is perfect. Those few times it's not, it's a good idea to know how it's done.
I am mainly looking at player collision right now, so just duplicate my cave walls and rename them for UCX like I would a normal asset or would I need to make multiple flat surfaces? (the latter would just take too much time for a cave system/tunnel + some land terrain that have been built as meshes.
edit - tried just duping the walls then using them as UCX but the collision bounds just absolutely freaks out in the game (not importing it). So basically using meshes for terrain/caves is completely out the window for me right now until I can sort it.
i have to check it but it definitely works and all the blockouts in airborn are always per poly collision, turn off the simple collision types in the static mesh first, then turn on complex collision and block all, i'm not sure if thats it but its not that many settings that you couldn't play around with it
Here is a tip to bring out the best in what you've made by giving you access to all the resolution without changing to the wrong LODBias group. You will need to edit two ini files:
UTGame\Config\DefaultEngine.iniand UTGame\Config\DefaultEngineUDK.ini. A lot of assets fall into the WORLD so look for this line:
From there you can change the max res of your textures for whatever LODBias group you want. I would suggest to do this only for demos. Back up your INI files.
Klumpmeister, i don't get what you really want to do? no you should not model with it like you can do it in max, well you can certainly use brushes as said before but its ugly to use and not really a possibility - but you can of course create stuff with it, that is not UT
So I've been looking for Specular Boost in the world settings. I could swear I've seen it there before. But it's nowhere to be seen. Is it no longer included in the more recent versions of UDK?
I have some quick questions about organizing your udk level - cross posting from my wip thread:
Some quick questions about UDK to speed up my tutorial googling time - what's the best way to organize a scene/level? a package for every prop? a package for the level? Where can I save my packages so that the supplied Unreal stuff doesn't clog up my browser? thanks!
I have some quick questions about organizing your udk level - cross posting from my wip thread:
Some quick questions about UDK to speed up my tutorial googling time - what's the best way to organize a scene/level? a package for every prop? a package for the level? Where can I save my packages so that the supplied Unreal stuff doesn't clog up my browser? thanks!
Personal stuff, like showing off your work, however you want. Things for mods/jobs, it's a case by case. Teams have different ways of doing it.
I've worked with packages for object types with one central package for materials. Then there was the local, world and dynamic package set ups.. it really depended on the type of game I was on.
I do my packages by project for personal things. So I have my WhateverLevel and it has a WhateverPackage, that has Models, Textures, Materials, Particles, Characters, Sounds.. etc... subfolders. My models are modelname_smesh, textures are texturename_texturetype, materials are materialname_material or matinst. Whatever_physmat... When I have dynamic objects it's objectname_dynaObject...
Ok, anyone having an issue with FBX where the UV map channels swap from UDK to Maya (2009)? It's totally random. Also crashing on re-import of the same mesh? I have to force delete to import a mesh when I use FBX.
I'm using a directional light, but my shadows are always sharp and tidy, how can I fade the edges? Shadow Exponent in the Lightmass settings of the actor isn't having much effect. Also, any reason why the corners of the light are angled?
I'm using a directional light, but my shadows are always sharp and tidy, how can I fade the edges? Shadow Exponent in the Lightmass settings of the actor isn't having much effect. Also, any reason why the corners of the light are angled?
Set the 'Light Source Angle' to 0.8 or higher. It defaults to 0.2 and directly controls your shadow sharpness.
Set the 'Light Source Angle' to 0.8 or higher. It defaults to 0.2 and directly controls your shadow sharpness.
perfect! thanks!
Is it a dumb question to ask what all the grainy shadows are in my level that seem to move around with me? and how to control them / make them not look like shit?:shifty:
e: by which I mean these shadows. They also leave a halo of light around meshes in the foreground.
Attempting to change the color of the lower half of my texture in the material editor but I'm not sure where to go from here. I thought I could use an alpha from the texture to determine what part got added color but it makes the rest of the texture show up as black.
I'm assuming I'm just hooking up the nodes wrong but is it even worth it? Is it more efficient? Or am I better off just importing 2 textures, one with the bottom half colored and the second without?
Currently I've added color variance to other textures that have multiple instances of the same base texture. But its hard to get the colors to match for this specific texture when ones colored in photoshop and the other in unreal.
To avoid normal map seams... Do I have to set the edges of my UV islands to hard edges before baking? (or split the edges modo doesn't use smoothinggroups/hard edges...)
I baked in xnormal and the model is without seams in Modo's viewport, but has seams in UDK.
edit: they are not seams along a mirrored centerline, either.
Edit2: I rebaked my normal map with all the UV seams split. That did NOT help haha... Just ended up with even bigger seams in some places. Any ideas? I feel like if I can't get this sorted there's no way I can make a properly modular or tiling asset in the future.
HOWEVER, it could be because I used the average normals setting on import to xnormal? Had to use that workaround to make it go as I couldn't get modo to export a smoothed .obj
You might want to give Ariel Chai's pipelineIO script a try. The new service pack 5-2 for Modo might also help with exporting proper vertex normals to xNormal, though you might have to use FBX or Collada.
Thanks, Ben. I was unaware of that modo script. Hopefully it will work fine with my version, but it looks like I will have do do a lot more experimenting before I get it down.
This is not for a static mesh, so luckily the lightmap is not the issue
Thanks again. I will check out the script and see how rendering with the cage can help.
So the package for my current environment is at 301mb. I get a warning message that it shouldn't exceed 300mb. How would I go about splitting my package into separate ones? I've never done this before and I'm afraid of exploding something. Any advice here?
Thanks!
So the package for my current environment is at 301mb. I get a warning message that it shouldn't exceed 300mb. How would I go about splitting my package into separate ones? I've never done this before and I'm afraid of exploding something. Any advice here?
Thanks!
Back up first.
Create the empty package that you want to send things to (maybe you want to split foliage from the rest?). Try to make some sense into what this package will contain. Then right click the file you want to move and choose rename, and just change the package name and it will go to the new one. Save both ASAP, don't do a ton of them, then save, you don't want to crash in the middle of something like this.
From my dealings in the past, you do not need to re-link anything in your scene, when you rename, it will leave information about that asset in the old package and tell UDK where to find it in the new package.
Is it a dumb question to ask what all the grainy shadows are in my level that seem to move around with me? and how to control them / make them not look like shit?:shifty:
e: by which I mean these shadows. They also leave a halo of light around meshes in the foreground.
that's screen space ambient occlusion. you can mess with it in the UTPostProcess_Console pp-chain.
i'd only worry about it once you have textures on your geometry since it will be less noticeable then.
Attempting to change the color of the lower half of my texture in the material editor but I'm not sure where to go from here. I thought I could use an alpha from the texture to determine what part got added color but it makes the rest of the texture show up as black.
I'm assuming I'm just hooking up the nodes wrong but is it even worth it? Is it more efficient? Or am I better off just importing 2 textures, one with the bottom half colored and the second without?
Currently I've added color variance to other textures that have multiple instances of the same base texture. But its hard to get the colors to match for this specific texture when ones colored in photoshop and the other in unreal.
use a lerp instead of a multiply to blend between the regular colored texture and version where you multiply a constant3 vector with the same texture. convert the constant3 to a parameter so you get the color picker which should make it easier to get a color that looks right.
use a lerp instead of a multiply to blend between the regular colored texture and version where you multiply a constant3 vector with the same texture. convert the constant3 to a parameter so you get the color picker which should make it easier to get a color that looks right.
So has anyone ever run into this? There are no blue lights in my scene, yet some objects seem to be getting hit by something that emits blue. It didn't happen until I rebuilt my level, after loading in a bunch of normal maps. It almost looks like certain objects are creating a glow, but there's nothing in their materials that I can see would do it. Anyone know what might be causing this????
i've been trying to render out a camera.
so far i've got my kismet and matinee set up i just dont know what to do next so i can render it out???
(hopefully lamont you'll read this - i know you made that tutorial a wile ago but im stuck on the cooking section. how do i get my map into the cooker?)
@ ben and mbullister, no on both counts. It looks like it's coming from some small, very specific parts of the level, so it makes me think some object is emitting blue light and I don't know which one. Or it could be something else. Hmmmmmmm....
EDIT: Okay, so now that I look at it, the color is exactly the same as the purple found in the default texture like one of you said. I've checked everything though, and I have NO materials that have the default checkered material on them in the entire level. This is very, very odd.
Figured it out. I had some collision meshes that had the default material on them that I hid in the editor and in-game. I figured that since they weren't visible, they wouldn't bleed any of their colors onto other objects. I was obviously wrong. Thanks to all of you for putting up with my noob-ness, lol.
Replies
Instead I've gone and taken advantage of the channels in both the lights and the objects I'm trying to light (where the bounce light isn't affecting it enough). So just ticking away on the UnNamed_# channels and linking them up with the meshes I need to light, while at the same time removing tick channels for the newly added lights so they don't affect other objects.
Cheers again.
Or...just take Neox's route.
EDIT: Okay, I think I figured it out. I have quite a few layers on the terrain, and one is a layer that has dead leaves and branches for underneath the trees in my map. I added a normal map to it, and this "artifact" appeared. I unplugged said normal map, and it disappeared. I would love to have the normal map on it, but it's not absolutely essential. Anyone know the technical reason behind this?
If U choose normalmap or normalmap alpha compression the file get'S compressed as a DXT1 diffuse and not a normalmap.
normalmap uncompressed works but scales down the texture independently from the group settings.
I am mainly looking at player collision right now, so just duplicate my cave walls and rename them for UCX like I would a normal asset or would I need to make multiple flat surfaces? (the latter would just take too much time for a cave system/tunnel + some land terrain that have been built as meshes.
edit - tried just duping the walls then using them as UCX but the collision bounds just absolutely freaks out in the game (not importing it). So basically using meshes for terrain/caves is completely out the window for me right now until I can sort it.
i have to check it but it definitely works and all the blockouts in airborn are always per poly collision, turn off the simple collision types in the static mesh first, then turn on complex collision and block all, i'm not sure if thats it but its not that many settings that you couldn't play around with it
http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/CollisionTutorial.html
No. Unless you really want to go insane with brushes :shifty:
So when I tried to apply a material to a BSP brush, I get this.
WTF is going on?
and this, I can't save my package in he content browser.
Some quick questions about UDK to speed up my tutorial googling time - what's the best way to organize a scene/level? a package for every prop? a package for the level? Where can I save my packages so that the supplied Unreal stuff doesn't clog up my browser? thanks!
I've worked with packages for object types with one central package for materials. Then there was the local, world and dynamic package set ups.. it really depended on the type of game I was on.
I do my packages by project for personal things. So I have my WhateverLevel and it has a WhateverPackage, that has Models, Textures, Materials, Particles, Characters, Sounds.. etc... subfolders. My models are modelname_smesh, textures are texturename_texturetype, materials are materialname_material or matinst. Whatever_physmat... When I have dynamic objects it's objectname_dynaObject...
I'm using a directional light, but my shadows are always sharp and tidy, how can I fade the edges? Shadow Exponent in the Lightmass settings of the actor isn't having much effect. Also, any reason why the corners of the light are angled?
perfect! thanks!
Is it a dumb question to ask what all the grainy shadows are in my level that seem to move around with me? and how to control them / make them not look like shit?:shifty:
e: by which I mean these shadows. They also leave a halo of light around meshes in the foreground.
I'm assuming I'm just hooking up the nodes wrong but is it even worth it? Is it more efficient? Or am I better off just importing 2 textures, one with the bottom half colored and the second without?
Currently I've added color variance to other textures that have multiple instances of the same base texture. But its hard to get the colors to match for this specific texture when ones colored in photoshop and the other in unreal.
I baked in xnormal and the model is without seams in Modo's viewport, but has seams in UDK.
edit: they are not seams along a mirrored centerline, either.
Edit2: I rebaked my normal map with all the UV seams split. That did NOT help haha... Just ended up with even bigger seams in some places. Any ideas? I feel like if I can't get this sorted there's no way I can make a properly modular or tiling asset in the future.
HOWEVER, it could be because I used the average normals setting on import to xnormal? Had to use that workaround to make it go as I couldn't get modo to export a smoothed .obj
You might want to give Ariel Chai's pipelineIO script a try. The new service pack 5-2 for Modo might also help with exporting proper vertex normals to xNormal, though you might have to use FBX or Collada.
Also check out the Normal Maps: Can Somone Explain This "Black Edge" issue thread especially EarthQuake's reply.
EDIT:
I forgot to mention the way you setup the light map UVs on your static meshes will also have a big impact on visual seams once you bake lighting.
Basically you want to have continuous UVs (on your light map UVs) where you don't want seams and splits where you want hard edged shadows.
This is not for a static mesh, so luckily the lightmap is not the issue
Thanks again. I will check out the script and see how rendering with the cage can help.
Thanks!
Create the empty package that you want to send things to (maybe you want to split foliage from the rest?). Try to make some sense into what this package will contain. Then right click the file you want to move and choose rename, and just change the package name and it will go to the new one. Save both ASAP, don't do a ton of them, then save, you don't want to crash in the middle of something like this.
From my dealings in the past, you do not need to re-link anything in your scene, when you rename, it will leave information about that asset in the old package and tell UDK where to find it in the new package.
that's screen space ambient occlusion. you can mess with it in the UTPostProcess_Console pp-chain.
i'd only worry about it once you have textures on your geometry since it will be less noticeable then.
use a lerp instead of a multiply to blend between the regular colored texture and version where you multiply a constant3 vector with the same texture. convert the constant3 to a parameter so you get the color picker which should make it easier to get a color that looks right.
So has anyone ever run into this? There are no blue lights in my scene, yet some objects seem to be getting hit by something that emits blue. It didn't happen until I rebuilt my level, after loading in a bunch of normal maps. It almost looks like certain objects are creating a glow, but there's nothing in their materials that I can see would do it. Anyone know what might be causing this????
Thanks in advance.
It might be the Environment Color setting which can be found under View -> World Properties -> Lightmass -> Lightmass Settings -> Environment Color.
I hope that helps.
This might be a dumb question, but did you make sure to apply a material to everything in the scene?
The pattern of blue on the back left wall looks to me like bounce from a null texture.
so far i've got my kismet and matinee set up i just dont know what to do next so i can render it out???
(hopefully lamont you'll read this - i know you made that tutorial a wile ago but im stuck on the cooking section. how do i get my map into the cooker?)
EDIT: Okay, so now that I look at it, the color is exactly the same as the purple found in the default texture like one of you said. I've checked everything though, and I have NO materials that have the default checkered material on them in the entire level. This is very, very odd.
Here's a shot of another problem area. Just to maybe make it easier for someone to troubleshoot.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=73930