Best way to create headlights?

Hi, I’ve recently come from unity where I’ve used spot lights for this. If you look directly into a spot light it looks like it’s emitting light. But in unreal, the spot light can only been seen on surfaces, if I look directly at it, it looks like no light is being emitted from the source. How could I achieve a similar effect? Thanks.

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An emissive mesh as well as the spot.

Ya, I kind of was afraid of that, the model is from the marketplace and I don’t have access to the mesh like that.

It’s ok, you can just plonk a mesh in there that’s roughly the right shape. Sort of kitbash.

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I very frequently steal the materials from the DMX plugin to make mesh’s. It’s a bit of work to set it up outside the DMX environment but it’s a great example.

Can you show the headlight?

if you want something realistic looking, adding a light profile to the spotlight may just do the trick without having to add meshes or modify stuff.

In all other cases, the best/preferred way is to add a cone and create a quick volumetric shader. OR, you can take apart the god rays from the sample project light temple and re-work their material for the purpose.

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Thanks for the suggestions. And this is one vehicle


Ok. So it’s hard to tell from here, but this

image

is probably a mesh. And when the headlights are on, you can swap its material for an orange emissive.

I just noticed the whole van is a mesh… Hmm… Are there any other assets with it?

You can always make something roughly the same shape and put it in there…

Unless I don’t know where to look, I don’t think it is

Here’s my stand in mesh

Just open the modelling tools

  1. Make a cube

  2. Remesh - about 2500

  3. Offset

image

  1. Scale in Y

To be fair, that first example was remesh at 5k. But about 2500 will probably do.

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ok thanks, I’ll mark this as the solution since it’s the easiest for me to do right now I believe.

Cool. The van is a skeletal mesh. So probably lots of bits move right? It’s worth looking at that. Or that material for the van. You may also be able to change the lights from there…

unfortunately the headlights are grouped with the rest of the transparent materials. Guess I can’t complain too much, it is free

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Export the model to blender and separate things.

To work right, headlight has to have an outer glass and an inside geometry thats set to chrome. Just like the real thing.
Then using spotlights not pointlights, plus a proper light profile you get realistic results.

Same as the automotive showcase stuff from years ago.