Thanks for the ideas Parkar. Another thing I just thought of just to test the idea is to move them 10k units out of the scene or something once gameplay starts. Not an ideal final solution but something that will work temporarily.
I can't use stationary lights because I'll quickly run into the 4 light overlap limit, and using stationary lights with shadow casting disabled looks bad in the situations I'm using them.
That's actually quite doable using blueprints. Just hide the static mesh component on event begin play. If you're feeling really fancy you could set the scale of the static mesh component from a parameter, or vary the point light's intensity and color, using the construction script.
Allow me to illustrate. Here's a blueprint in my scene that has a light and a big, bright ball.
You'll notice that it shows up in the metal material sphere. This could feasibly be screen-space reflections at work, but let's see what happens when I hit Play.
While the sphere has disappeared, the reflections have not. This must mean that I'm getting lighting from a reflection capture after I've built lighting, although the sphere is gone from the scene.
Here's the blueprint that I used to make this possible.
First, the components so you can see what I've got.
And, the event graph that hides the mesh in the game but not while computing lighting.
Pretty easy, right?
In a real scene, it would probably be better to figure out how you can add real-world lamps, light-emitting diodes, and emissive greebles to contribute to specular highlights, as it can look kind of odd to have your surfaces reflect things that aren't there. But I'm sure you already knew that and can use your good judgment.
In case you had any doubt as to how fast this can be once you've got the blueprint set up, here's a render with several more static lights reflected in metal:
And here's the sky behind me:
You can estimate how long it took based on the time between posts, and perhaps something inferred about upload and typing speeds.
Bingo Jed, thanks! That's exactly what I was thinking
Now I can add rim lights to my heart's content without needing stationary lights!
Setting something up now - sphere radius driven by light source radius, color hookup, etc. Spotlights are using a single sided disc primative. Capsule lights can even be supported, might be a little tricky, but I'll scale a cylinder and cap it.
OK I got a nice little blueprint going and it looks great so far. The remaining piece of the puzzle is figuring out a way to hide all of these glowing spheres when you're working in the editor. Anybody know a way to Blueprint the "game mode" state, so when you hit "G" in the editor you can hide actor components? There is game mode stuff that I see but I think it's related to actual gameplay stuff, not editor commands. Other creative work-arounds are more than welcome too
There is two flags to set the visibility of an object, one global and one other for an in-game context only. Simply disable totally the visility of the sphere in its properties. You can also add a boolean in the properties of your blueprint to override it sometimes when you need it.
There is two flags to set the visibility of an object, one global and one other for an in-game context only. Simply disable totally the visility of the sphere in its properties. You can also add a boolean in the properties of your blueprint to override it sometimes when you need it.
Yeah, unfortunately I've already tried those. I'm using the core Visibility flag to turn off the spheres when I'm playing the actual game, which works fine. However, the other "Actor Hidden in Game" flag also causes the spheres to not be captured by my reflection captures.
My only other idea is to do something material based, maybe setting the sphere geometry to be transparent facing the camera.
No this has nothing to do with decals. Static lights don't emit direct specular on metallic surfaces from the light sources themselves, so I'm instead adding emissive geometry into the scene to get captured by reflection captures.
Froyok, I ended up using the KISS mentality and just added a bool flag to my blueprint to make the materials fully masked. Make them visible for a bake, then turn off. So far it's working decently well.
No this has nothing to do with decals. Static lights don't emit direct specular on metallic surfaces from the light sources themselves, so I'm instead adding emissive geometry into the scene to get captured by reflection captures.
I was just speaking in general lol. I'm working on a project in 4.4 and I was only fully able to see my decal when it was in the presence of a stationary or movable light. With baked lighting it wouldn't show up. Was wondering if thats just how it is.
I was just speaking in general lol. I'm working on a project in 4.4 and I was only fully able to see my decal when it was in the presence of a stationary or movable light. With baked lighting it wouldn't show up. Was wondering if thats just how it is.
You can enable a feature that gives the decals and additional rendering pass and buffer which solves this. It's off by default ass it adds additional cost even if you have no decals in your scene. If you search the UE forums and answer HUB for DBuffer you should find some usefull inof with a bit of digging.
Yeah I was looking at some answers on there. I wasn't sure if I still had to do that because those answers weren't for 4.4. Also, in the 4.4 version of the Quixel Dues Ex scene, the decals seem to work fine while the material mode is set to translucent, instead of D.Buffer w/e they want you to set it as. If I still have to do this though, where is the BaseEngine.ini I need to edit?
UDK seems to enjoy messing up the lighting for my objects when they are exactly where I need them to be but when I move them slightly out of place then the lighting is correct.
UDK seems to enjoy messing up the lighting for my objects when they are exactly where I need them to be but when I move them slightly out of place then the lighting is correct.
UE4, not UDK.
Is that a dynamic object ? What happen when you build the lighting with lightmass ?
UDK seems to enjoy messing up the lighting for my objects when they are exactly where I need them to be but when I move them slightly out of place then the lighting is correct.
Hi guys, I have had my hard drive reformatted and now UE4 looks really bad "in game" its fine in the editor, any ideas?
I tried this?
Edit>Project Settings>Rendering scroll down a long way Editor on the right Editor Primitive MSAA set it to something higher? I tried 4xMSAA
Could someone explain to me how practical it is to use tesselation in a scene? Like what is the performance cost.. and is it advisable to use tessellation only on certain objects or can i drop tessellatio non all assets in the scene etc? Any input is deeply appreciated.
If anyone wants to know the issue above to my last post, its fixed, PC must have reset the option? /\
Quick Settings > Engine Scalability Settings. Set it to Epic.
4.5 is released. It includes an artist template map, I believe it's a map called AdvancedLighting if you use starter content in your project. Basically its a small scene for viewing assets in. It has a blueprint that ties together directional light,fog, HDRI etc in one place. It also comes with a HDRI cubemap of Epic's courtyard. Let me know what you think! Having feedback on that blueprint would be helpful
I'm kinda confused how the AdvancedLighting is supposed to be used, the scale is really huge when using existing UE4 assets. Is it for baking lighting, or real-time use, or both?
JordanW: it might be helpful to have more checkboxes that automatically set up various rendering features, like distance field AO, distance field shadows, light propagation volumes, options for dynamic and static skylights as well as stationary, options for a static directional light, any screen space reflection tweaks that one might find useful, the amount of blur on the skybox, whether to show a skybox that has the image on it or to show a skybox that's a neutral grey (but still use the HDRI for lighting) etc.
I'm not saying it has to do all those things, I'm just saying that it could be nice if it would do some of those things.
I have a room with several windows that share same mesh. I have copied all the windows from one of them in the scene. I realized that when baking the light all the windows share the same lightmap ! I mean they have same bake shadows on them which they shouldn't .
I would like to mention that importing FBX files from Maya whilst working in meters and then importing it into UE4, the object will become really small and will need some serious scaling to get rid of the problem.
The way i got around it is because i found out that UE4 processes imports in centimeter values. So all i do, when I've finished modeling in meters on Maya, is go to Window>Settings/Preferences>Preferences - Settings, and change it from meters to centimeters. This way it comes out in the correct scale on UE4 when it is Imported from Maya.
Just wanted to randomly share this. I was trying for a long time to figure out how to make a sine wave travel in a different direction than always on the X axis for wind effects. I also searched a ton, couldn't find anything about it, could only find epic materials that had waves travelling on the X and Y axes with some awkward math. Yada yada, I was resigned to use a panning texture rather than sine waves but then I accidentally stumbled on this solution with breaking apart the channels and adding them back together. 'windDirectionRGB' is a normalized vector set by a blueprint, basically the winddirection from udk.
Long story short, this makes a sine wave travel in any direction you want in world space. You just need to have a direction vector.
I wonder how to set up proper lighting in a dark scene, with only few light sources for example wall light, desk lamp and thats it. Forget about windows. In UDK that was much easier rather than in UE4 where static lights are now diffuse only - stationary light doesn't seem to work well, especially lightmass process even when I change some things in settings.
I wonder how to set up proper lighting in a dark scene, with only few light sources for example wall light, desk lamp and thats it. Forget about windows. In UDK that was much easier rather than in UE4 where static lights are now diffuse only - stationary light doesn't seem to work well, especially lightmass process even when I change some things in settings.
Have you tried disabling "eye adaptation" by using a post-process volume to lock the exposure? That should help with calibrating a dark scene, as the adaptation can really brighten up a scene.
If you need specular highlights from static lights you can get a lot of control by placing emissive static meshes where your lights are. They'll get picked up by the reflection capture actors that you place and should therefore contribute to the reflection environment. If you are using something like a simple sphere that you don't want to be visible in game, you can hook up a blueprint that hides the sphere on begin play. It'll get picked up when you capture the environment but will get hidden once you start playing.
I turned off eye adaption, but I can't see any differences, everything looks the same. I moved Post Process Volum on the scene, then I change size of box and set Auto Exposure to 1.0 Min and Max Brightness.
This is probably not the correct thread, but can you seriously no longer have a new line by pressing ENTER in the description of the nodes in the material shader in 4.6? In 4.5.1 I could do that but now the description is just 1 long line which make any long description unreadable.
You shouldn't need to do anything fancy to make a plastic material, unless the material you want to emulate needs some subsurface scattering. Just have an appropriate base color, roughness, and normal map.
Random question but I was reading about Weight maps in UE4 for landscape and I'm getting really confused with the term. Are weight maps the same as a splat map? A splat map being the combination of several weight maps? Or what's the difference?
Random question but I was reading about Weight maps in UE4 for landscape and I'm getting really confused with the term. Are weight maps the same as a splat map? A splat map being the combination of several weight maps? Or what's the difference?
Long time no response from me. Currently there is no update to show. I am discussing a few things with AMD about organization of the source and task allocation. So hopefully we will be able to get cracking on some good updates soon. Editor and Material Editor integration and rendering optimizations being top priority in my list.
Replies
I can't use stationary lights because I'll quickly run into the 4 light overlap limit, and using stationary lights with shadow casting disabled looks bad in the situations I'm using them.
Allow me to illustrate. Here's a blueprint in my scene that has a light and a big, bright ball.
You'll notice that it shows up in the metal material sphere. This could feasibly be screen-space reflections at work, but let's see what happens when I hit Play.
While the sphere has disappeared, the reflections have not. This must mean that I'm getting lighting from a reflection capture after I've built lighting, although the sphere is gone from the scene.
Here's the blueprint that I used to make this possible.
First, the components so you can see what I've got.
And, the event graph that hides the mesh in the game but not while computing lighting.
Pretty easy, right?
In a real scene, it would probably be better to figure out how you can add real-world lamps, light-emitting diodes, and emissive greebles to contribute to specular highlights, as it can look kind of odd to have your surfaces reflect things that aren't there. But I'm sure you already knew that and can use your good judgment.
And here's the sky behind me:
You can estimate how long it took based on the time between posts, and perhaps something inferred about upload and typing speeds.
Now I can add rim lights to my heart's content without needing stationary lights!
Setting something up now - sphere radius driven by light source radius, color hookup, etc. Spotlights are using a single sided disc primative. Capsule lights can even be supported, might be a little tricky, but I'll scale a cylinder and cap it.
Yeah, unfortunately I've already tried those. I'm using the core Visibility flag to turn off the spheres when I'm playing the actual game, which works fine. However, the other "Actor Hidden in Game" flag also causes the spheres to not be captured by my reflection captures.
My only other idea is to do something material based, maybe setting the sphere geometry to be transparent facing the camera.
No this has nothing to do with decals. Static lights don't emit direct specular on metallic surfaces from the light sources themselves, so I'm instead adding emissive geometry into the scene to get captured by reflection captures.
Froyok, I ended up using the KISS mentality and just added a bool flag to my blueprint to make the materials fully masked. Make them visible for a bake, then turn off. So far it's working decently well.
I was just speaking in general lol. I'm working on a project in 4.4 and I was only fully able to see my decal when it was in the presence of a stationary or movable light. With baked lighting it wouldn't show up. Was wondering if thats just how it is.
You can enable a feature that gives the decals and additional rendering pass and buffer which solves this. It's off by default ass it adds additional cost even if you have no decals in your scene. If you search the UE forums and answer HUB for DBuffer you should find some usefull inof with a bit of digging.
Here is one link I found now but I think there was some other place with better info.https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/25508/decals-not-rendered-without-direct-lighting.html
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfZD22zMnUY
ArchVIZ in Unreal Engine 4 by Koola, enjoy
http://www.ronenbekerman.com/unreal-engine-4-and-archviz-by-koola/
www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAAPTiuFdwU
www.youtube.com/watch?v=157P9gXQVWQ
www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWY4gtLG8sY
www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwEuSxAEXPA
www.youtube.com/watch?v=gC0PdspqNYk#t=21
www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOkJ1-vnh-s
Substance and Unreal 4
Visual Clarity and Official Concept Art Preview
[ame]www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV-YSLbidzo[/ame]
UE4, not UDK.
Is that a dynamic object ? What happen when you build the lighting with lightmass ?
hypnotic
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=139907
- > https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-45-preview-notes
Does it fix the lightmass issues with foliage painting?
SAME
I tried this?
Edit>Project Settings>Rendering scroll down a long way Editor on the right Editor Primitive MSAA set it to something higher? I tried 4xMSAA
Quick Settings > Engine Scalability Settings. Set it to Epic.
4.5 is released. It includes an artist template map, I believe it's a map called AdvancedLighting if you use starter content in your project. Basically its a small scene for viewing assets in. It has a blueprint that ties together directional light,fog, HDRI etc in one place. It also comes with a HDRI cubemap of Epic's courtyard. Let me know what you think! Having feedback on that blueprint would be helpful
I'm not saying it has to do all those things, I'm just saying that it could be nice if it would do some of those things.
Am I right ? what can I do >?
Does anyone have a rough estimated time of arrival for UE4 export to Web HTML5 will be up and running?
I know there was this demonstration that Epic Games released but I have not heard anything since -https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/03/12/mozilla-and-epic-preview-unreal-engine-4-running-in-firefox/
[ame]www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2uNDlP4RiE[/ame]
http://tegleg.co.uk/ue4/BPFlying.html
The way i got around it is because i found out that UE4 processes imports in centimeter values. So all i do, when I've finished modeling in meters on Maya, is go to Window>Settings/Preferences>Preferences - Settings, and change it from meters to centimeters. This way it comes out in the correct scale on UE4 when it is Imported from Maya.
Long story short, this makes a sine wave travel in any direction you want in world space. You just need to have a direction vector.
Have you tried disabling "eye adaptation" by using a post-process volume to lock the exposure? That should help with calibrating a dark scene, as the adaptation can really brighten up a scene.
Made an old post about it here.
@edit
nevermind, it's working now
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Landscape/Materials/index.html#landscapelayerblendtypes
TL;DR Weight map is used determine the blending factor of some specific landscape layer. I have not heard of splat maps.
It is mentioned on the UE4 forum - https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?12454-NVidia-HairWorks
Well worth a watch - http://youtu.be/VFWr44ZIEZc
Yeah Hairworks looks amazing, would love to get it in UE4.
TressFX, used in the latest Tomb Raider, is one to look out for aswell.
[ame]