Creating a pulsing Emissive material

biofrost

What I am trying to do is have a floor that looks as if it has holes in it and have it seems like light is coming from underneath it. I also want to have this light fading in and out. Now I have this working but even though I have use emissive for static lighting checked it does not seem to be lighting my environment at all. When I override the nodes that make it pulse it lights the room but then I am not getting the correct effect.

chadabees

I'm no expert, but I don't think a pulsing emissive material can cast a pulsing light because an emissive can't cast dynamic lighting just static light. You would have to do this kind of thing using matinee and make a light that dims when the material dims.

glynnsmith

Yeah, you won't be able to get the env lit and pulsing with just a material. UDK basically bakes your emissive/bounce lighting to a lightmap, so it'll give you static lighting with lightmass.

You'll need to animate your material and a dynamic light with matinee (both in matinee, to the timing is synced to both), or use something like a light function, if you only need a simple lighting effect.

This is pretty much how I did it with the fireplace and TV in our Invaders video, although pretty subtly - Material + spotlight.

I figured out how to do it by having a look at Hourence's second Eat3D dvd, but there's a bunch of learning to be done if you search PC, UDK, or the internets in general.