So, I can get parts of my models to either go completely transparent, or not at all. I'm using blend_softmasked with two sided on, and I'm using a black and white image for the grayscale values. Basically, what I need is to make it so that parts where the glass is exposed is transparent, and parts where dirt appears is opaque. I've seen tutorials about making a surface uniformly transparent, but none about how to do it so that different parts of a black and white image give you more or less. Can this even be done?
so here's whats going on. i start with the original texture, multiplying it with my alpha to only mask that area.
i then multiply that by a value of 5 to get some of the diffuse detail to pop out a bit more.
then i add that with a value of 0.2 to get some of the opacity back, because we dont want to be able to see through it completely. 0.3 or .4 may work better than what ive chosen but its up to preference i guess.
then that is multiplied with the original masked version to get the black back into certain areas, because we do want some parts to be completely transparent.
then i clamp that from 0-1 so i dont get any sort of glow (caused by mulitplying it by 5),
and i add back the original alpha so nothing else is transparent.
Wow! This is awesome. Thank you SOOOOOO much for taking the time to lay that out for me. It's hard for me to wrap my head around, but at the very least I can replicate what you have. Basically, it's for a windshield that goes on a motorcycle. I currently have everything for the bike all in one texture, so when I use blend_translucent it makes the rest of the bike look weird, as if there's missing faces or something. Should I make the windshield glass it's own object, or is there some way to make sure the rest of the object is opaque? It seems like it's working for you.
I've been in the industry for a while, but only as an environment artist. Lately i have tinkered around with the concept of a point and click camera and i ran into this tutorial.
This has given me a SUPERB setup for what I'm thinking to do, however after doing all these changes, i am unable to figure out a method for connecting the mouse and camera rotation together.
SO I have the code for a point and click game set up with a camera attached and offset from the player through Kismet. Even though this is all fine so far, I want to link up a right click mouse button to activate the turning of the camera, and when it's released, it goes back to the point and click which is currently set up in that tutorial i posted earlier.
I am rather new to scripting, so any help with this would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance everyone!
I'm no authority on UDK scripting, but there's some documentation on UDK's site. Maybe you've already been to this page? If not, hope this helps.
Wow! This is awesome. Thank you SOOOOOO much for taking the time to lay that out for me. It's hard for me to wrap my head around, but at the very least I can replicate what you have. Basically, it's for a windshield that goes on a motorcycle. I currently have everything for the bike all in one texture, so when I use blend_translucent it makes the rest of the bike look weird, as if there's missing faces or something. Should I make the windshield glass it's own object, or is there some way to make sure the rest of the object is opaque? It seems like it's working for you.
you're welcome. and to get rid of that issue with the rest of the model being transparent, you have to mess with some of the Transparency lighting settings in the material. i forget which ones. but what i would suggest is to keep your texture as is, with everything on one sheet, but when you export it, just put the transparent object in a separate map slot. that way it will be independent from the rest of the motorcycle, and this way you can have 2 materials, one transparent for the glass, and one normal so it can get all of the good spec/normal detail that transparency would get rid of.
I've got these two cameras set up (going to be 3-4 when this little scene is done), I get all my keyframes and framing done the way I kinda want. get it cutting from one camera to the other using director. sweet, all at 38 fov.
then I close down matinee..
when I open it up again, all the cameras are either rotated totally wrong or in the screenshots case, not only rotated wrong, but totally not where I left it!
if I adjust the first keyframe on the first camera, the rest of the motion looks fine.
its just the first keyframe that seems to mess up.
I noticed that I had like 6 keyframes ontop of eachother, funny that udk does that instead of just keying ontop of the one you're working on, like in every other program on the face of the earth.
I deleted all the keyframes and set new ones. still get that error.
Whats up with that?
is it some kind of beta bug?
Im not running the latest build though, maybe the previous one or so..
any ideas? (other than going back and animating the camera on a skeletal hierarchy and then parenting the gamecam on that!)
With the stacked keyframes thing, make sure you're selecting the keyframe you're looking to edit rather than placing a new one over the top. It should say "Adjust key #" or similar in the viewport when you have the key selected.
The other problem with changes appearing to not be saved can be solved by right clicking on the movement track and selecting "world frame" instead of "relative to initial" - I've had this problem before as well! :P
hey that sounds like it could work eh!
thanks a ton!....now we play the waiting game for 8 hours until I can go home and work for real! ;D
again, thanks!
Recently started to mess with kismet. Any idea how to get a normal vector in kismet ? I created system where you press E and in the place you are looking at particle effect is spawned. It is always oriented "east" though. In factory node there is option to set rotation. Don't know how to get normal vector from something it hits. Maybe trace (which this whole thing is based on) can do that. Tried it though and didn't get any good result. I know its not programming forum but some of you have really big experience with udk.
So I've never worked with UE before, is there a walkthrough somewhere on how to set up 3ds Max units for UDK, and default player metrics? It looks like the camera defaults to 96 units tall, but I'm curious as to whether there is a cheat sheet somewhere for this stuff?
The units are just generic units. UDK uses snapping in power of 2 grids though (32, 64, 128, 256 etc) so you might want to adjust your grid in max to that. iirc the default room height is something like 160?
So I've never worked with UE before, is there a walkthrough somewhere on how to set up 3ds Max units for UDK, and default player metrics? It looks like the camera defaults to 96 units tall, but I'm curious as to whether there is a cheat sheet somewhere for this stuff?
@kyle: It looks like the camera shake code is in the player controller class so believe its gonna be in there for all of them. Though the playercollectorgame one doesnt have it but is not set to the right scale. Ill try and see if I can extend the player controller and override the camera shake.
Quite new to UDK, made a material that blends with vertex color (alpha) between 2 textures that have scalar mixing, now my question is, is there a way to make a material that can blend between 3 or more textures? perhaps one that uses R/G/B/A seperately? Not sure how to do the nodes there. Any ideas or examples would be very welcome!
Quite new to UDK, made a material that blends with vertex color (alpha) between 2 textures that have scalar mixing, now my question is, is there a way to make a material that can blend between 3 or more textures? perhaps one that uses R/G/B/A seperately? Not sure how to do the nodes there. Any ideas or examples would be very welcome!
Just make a chain of Linear Interpolate nodes and then plug the different colour ouputs of the vertex colour to the LERP nodes.
Hey guys. Does anyone know how can I invert the green channel of a normal map in a material? I tried oneminus and append, but it doesn't seem to work. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with gamma space.
I managed to do it on srgb textures, but not on normal maps.
Hi guys, i'm a bit of a UDK newbie at the moment and i'm stuck when it comes to LOD models.
How can i change the distance that a new LOD model will appear?
I need the new LOD model to kick in closer to the player.
I've searched what seems like everywhere and just can't seem to find the answer.
Thanks.
In the static mesh browser (as in double click the static mesh in content browser) and the LODMax Range setting. Then you can also change the LOD distance ratio.
In the static mesh browser (as in double click the static mesh in content browser) and the LODMax Range setting. Then you can also change the LOD distance ratio.
Oh, wow, thank you so much , the window on the right was only showing half of the content, so it just looked like a bunch of random numbers. Now i realise that they actually have have labels next to them.
When I bake my lighting in lightmass, disregarding quality level, I don't get cast shadows, but rather, a sort of AO-y shadow. Just really really blurred. No sharp shadows. They however, do pop up, when I wiggle the mesh a bit. Just any translation and suddenly the cast shadow of that mesh is there. I'm new to UDK so it's probably something stupid. What gives?
The resolutions on my static meshes are fine, I have seperate OK lightmass UVs on channel 2 and they are set to use those, and everywhere I can find shadows are turned on.
Thanks in advance for any help!
(Sorry if this is a known issue/has been mentioned before tons)
I just got my new Gtx 460 today and was hoping to give a shot at the new July version of UDK. After the 1.5 gb install, I double-click on it, but nothing happens. The UDK splash image is shown, and says It also says "UnSetup has stopped working", then the splash image just freezes. I also tried the previous June version and had the same problem. Any solutions would be awesome. Thanks for your time guys. I have Win 7 64 bit and I had no problem running UDK on my old 9600GT. Hopefully someone here can help me, because I couldn't find any on the UDK Forums. Thanks again guys!
Just found the issue! My main ground mesh had a wrong lightmap UV channel selected and was apparantly rendering on vertecies. Took me forever to find something simple like that but at least I learnt about most of the render/light settings etc along the way :P
Believe me man, I created a thread on the forums which lasted 3 pages and no progress at all. I was hoping someone here may have or had the same problem, and can give me a solution. My last resort is to back up all of my stuff and completely restart my computer. Hopefully someone here can assist me. I'd greatly appreciate it!
Did you connect the power adapters? Is the card getting proper voltage? Check the card settings for UDK? Also, did you un-install the drivers, then re-install?
Is it possible to "distort" translucent materials? I have a particle emitter that is basically heat distortion and if placed in front of a translucent material, everything else distorts accept that material Do translucent materials not support distortion?
Is it possible to "distort" translucent materials? I have a particle emitter that is basically heat distortion and if placed in front of a translucent material, everything else distorts accept that material Do translucent materials not support distortion?
It's an old video, at this time I was no good with the UDK, so the material is quite simple (nothing complicated). I can't say you today what I have done exactly unfortunately.
I have a material + particle setup similar to what you have, basically emitting little planes with planning normal maps in the distortion channel. It is working fine, and everything behind the emitter when looking at it from the side appears to distort, just like yours ACCEPT when I have a mesh, lets say a glass ball (which is a translucent material), behind the emitter. The distortion doesn't affect the mesh, it literally looks like it is masked out. The rest of the environment behind and around the glass mesh distort, but the glass stays the same. Its like meshes with BLEND_Translucent materials on them can't be distorted by other materials between them and the camera.
Hey guys I'm trying to figure out why my secondary and so on in my lens flare slot in the lens flare editor causes my materials to appear in the foreground in front of my other meshes. My first "Source" materials are fine they show up right behind my meshes. Any idea on what I should do to fix a problem such as this?
I have a material + particle setup similar to what you have, basically emitting little planes with planning normal maps in the distortion channel. It is working fine, and everything behind the emitter when looking at it from the side appears to distort, just like yours ACCEPT when I have a mesh, lets say a glass ball (which is a translucent material), behind the emitter. The distortion doesn't affect the mesh, it literally looks like it is masked out. The rest of the environment behind and around the glass mesh distort, but the glass stays the same. Its like meshes with BLEND_Translucent materials on them can't be distorted by other materials between them and the camera.
Thanks for the quick reply btw
Try toggling "Use One Layer Distortion" in the "Translucency" options of the particle material. I have successfully used that in the past to get water distortion to affect underwater particles that were translucent. It has some drawbacks, but I think it's the only easy way to achieve what you are looking for.
Does anyone know how to make a mesh fade in or out smoothly over a set period of time? I've tried using the visibility track in Matinee but it's just a hard 'show' or 'hide' and does transition in Can't get the track to appear in the curve editor either... Please help! xD
You need to set the blend type of the material to something appropriate, then use a materialfloat thinggery track in matinee to modify it at run time. MaterialInstanceActors are usually a good idea to use and hold a reference to your appropriate materials.
Hello Polycount members! My name is Rogelio Delgado and I am currently a student at Full Sail university for Videogame Art I am an aspiring environment artist and hope to get into the industry sometime very soon! Now that I've introduced myself, I have a question.
The other day I was surfing the web and came across a cool demo of a candle in UDK that has SSS applied to it. If anyone could direct me to that video of the candle flickering using the SSS material I would REALLY appreciate it! My girlfriend is building a candle this month for one of her classes and I wanted to show her what it could look like! (The video above is close, but not what I was looking at previously.)
If you'd like to check out some of my art, my portfolio site is HERE
Replies
This is what I'm shooting for:
Thanks in advance....
so here's whats going on. i start with the original texture, multiplying it with my alpha to only mask that area.
i then multiply that by a value of 5 to get some of the diffuse detail to pop out a bit more.
then i add that with a value of 0.2 to get some of the opacity back, because we dont want to be able to see through it completely. 0.3 or .4 may work better than what ive chosen but its up to preference i guess.
then that is multiplied with the original masked version to get the black back into certain areas, because we do want some parts to be completely transparent.
then i clamp that from 0-1 so i dont get any sort of glow (caused by mulitplying it by 5),
and i add back the original alpha so nothing else is transparent.
I'm no authority on UDK scripting, but there's some documentation on UDK's site. Maybe you've already been to this page? If not, hope this helps.
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/GettingStartedProgramming.html
you're welcome. and to get rid of that issue with the rest of the model being transparent, you have to mess with some of the Transparency lighting settings in the material. i forget which ones. but what i would suggest is to keep your texture as is, with everything on one sheet, but when you export it, just put the transparent object in a separate map slot. that way it will be independent from the rest of the motorcycle, and this way you can have 2 materials, one transparent for the glass, and one normal so it can get all of the good spec/normal detail that transparency would get rid of.
hey guys,
got an issue with matinee! yay
I've got these two cameras set up (going to be 3-4 when this little scene is done), I get all my keyframes and framing done the way I kinda want. get it cutting from one camera to the other using director. sweet, all at 38 fov.
then I close down matinee..
when I open it up again, all the cameras are either rotated totally wrong or in the screenshots case, not only rotated wrong, but totally not where I left it!
if I adjust the first keyframe on the first camera, the rest of the motion looks fine.
its just the first keyframe that seems to mess up.
I noticed that I had like 6 keyframes ontop of eachother, funny that udk does that instead of just keying ontop of the one you're working on, like in every other program on the face of the earth.
I deleted all the keyframes and set new ones. still get that error.
Whats up with that?
is it some kind of beta bug?
Im not running the latest build though, maybe the previous one or so..
any ideas? (other than going back and animating the camera on a skeletal hierarchy and then parenting the gamecam on that!)
With the stacked keyframes thing, make sure you're selecting the keyframe you're looking to edit rather than placing a new one over the top. It should say "Adjust key #" or similar in the viewport when you have the key selected.
The other problem with changes appearing to not be saved can be solved by right clicking on the movement track and selecting "world frame" instead of "relative to initial" - I've had this problem before as well! :P
See this thread also, sounds like what you're experiencing: http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=762153
thanks a ton!....now we play the waiting game for 8 hours until I can go home and work for real! ;D
again, thanks!
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ChangingUnits.html#Current Game Scales
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/UnrealUnits.html
Just change the game type through the world info. Its actually coded in as a gametype which I believe is SimpleGame by default.
Tried "none" and "simple game" and it still has it
yeah. Ill take a look tonight and report back.
Just make a chain of Linear Interpolate nodes and then plug the different colour ouputs of the vertex colour to the LERP nodes.
I managed to do it on srgb textures, but not on normal maps.
http://udk.com/news-beta-july2011
Was reading up on it like last couple of days. Blows my mind still
How can i change the distance that a new LOD model will appear?
I need the new LOD model to kick in closer to the player.
I've searched what seems like everywhere and just can't seem to find the answer.
Thanks.
In the static mesh browser (as in double click the static mesh in content browser) and the LODMax Range setting. Then you can also change the LOD distance ratio.
Oh, wow, thank you so much
The resolutions on my static meshes are fine, I have seperate OK lightmass UVs on channel 2 and they are set to use those, and everywhere I can find shadows are turned on.
Thanks in advance for any help!
(Sorry if this is a known issue/has been mentioned before tons)
I just got my new Gtx 460 today and was hoping to give a shot at the new July version of UDK. After the 1.5 gb install, I double-click on it, but nothing happens. The UDK splash image is shown, and says It also says "UnSetup has stopped working", then the splash image just freezes. I also tried the previous June version and had the same problem. Any solutions would be awesome. Thanks for your time guys. I have Win 7 64 bit and I had no problem running UDK on my old 9600GT. Hopefully someone here can help me, because I couldn't find any on the UDK Forums. Thanks again guys!
Nick
@Highelf: yea, lets see a screen.
Believe me man, I created a thread on the forums which lasted 3 pages and no progress at all. I was hoping someone here may have or had the same problem, and can give me a solution. My last resort is to back up all of my stuff and completely restart my computer. Hopefully someone here can assist me. I'd greatly appreciate it!
[ame]
It's an old video, at this time I was no good with the UDK, so the material is quite simple (nothing complicated). I can't say you today what I have done exactly unfortunately.
I have a material + particle setup similar to what you have, basically emitting little planes with planning normal maps in the distortion channel. It is working fine, and everything behind the emitter when looking at it from the side appears to distort, just like yours ACCEPT when I have a mesh, lets say a glass ball (which is a translucent material), behind the emitter. The distortion doesn't affect the mesh, it literally looks like it is masked out. The rest of the environment behind and around the glass mesh distort, but the glass stays the same. Its like meshes with BLEND_Translucent materials on them can't be distorted by other materials between them and the camera.
Thanks for the quick reply btw
Thanks.
Try toggling "Use One Layer Distortion" in the "Translucency" options of the particle material. I have successfully used that in the past to get water distortion to affect underwater particles that were translucent. It has some drawbacks, but I think it's the only easy way to achieve what you are looking for.
-eaa
Does anyone know how to make a mesh fade in or out smoothly over a set period of time? I've tried using the visibility track in Matinee but it's just a hard 'show' or 'hide' and does transition in
Of course :P lol thanks
You wouldn't happen to have a tutorial for this? I'm being an idiot and can't get it to work
The other day I was surfing the web and came across a cool demo of a candle in UDK that has SSS applied to it. If anyone could direct me to that video of the candle flickering using the SSS material I would REALLY appreciate it! My girlfriend is building a candle this month for one of her classes and I wanted to show her what it could look like! (The video above is close, but not what I was looking at previously.)
If you'd like to check out some of my art, my portfolio site is HERE
Thanks everyone!