Self-Shadowing Materials

Hey folks,

I was quite surprised about the performance of the BumpOffset-Node and so far got some quite nice-looking gravel and sand-materials for my landscape.
However, the lack of self-shadowing is obvious :smiley: This would improve the materials a lot as the map is set in late afternoon-lighting with incident sun light at low angles.

I tried this approach that worked quite well in UDK3 but now does not seem to work anymore. It tells me that the “LightVector”-Node can only be used in deffered materials or decals?

Any hints on that?

Thank you!

Push
Does someone has an idea of how to approach that? I have a couple of materials that would really benefit from it. I got the bumpoffset to look really nice but it would be soo good if the bumps would actually cast shadows…

Could you post some images of what you’re referencing?

Hey -

I provided a solution to this on the answerhub here, Self-Shadowing Materials - Rendering - Epic Developer Community Forums

The difficult part is that a material cannot directly reference lighting anymore due to the deferred rendering pipeline and you have to use a Dynamic Material Instance with Vector and Scalar parameters in Blueprints to call reference of the lighting.

Hope this helps out.

Hey, thanks! This looks extremely interesting; Iam going to give it a try tomorrow :slight_smile:
Hmm, and yes, it sounds performance-heavy, so I guess it’s recommendet to use this only on few instances…