The only method for creating external cubemaps relies on an outdated plugin whose development have stopped 2012 and doesnt work after Photoshop CS6.
In UDK it was possible to create cubemaps with 6 different textures within internal engine itself.
AmbientCubemaps can be generated by importing a longitude latitude cubemap (unwrapped, usually 2x as wide) as hdr image.
The mips are automatically generated to be preblurred for correct roughness.
> In UDK it was possible to create cubemaps with 6 different textures within internal engine itself.
We removed that as it was causing a lot complications in the engine.
It would not be to hard to improve the import to support different formats / layouts.
Yeah Martin it wouldnt.
3 months and nothing new.
Wow, so much butthurt. They have better things to do than allow you to import cubemaps, you know.
The only real reason to use cubemaps now are for translucent surfaces, where deferred lighting fails. It would be nice to have some sort of a workflow to generate a cubemap, specify the roughness, then use it in the material of a translucent surface, but I’m not going to die if it doesn’t happen right away. If you want to custom-make your own lighting from textures, you can use a sphere-mapping technique in an unlit material: no need for cubemap textures, just a couple of sphere images, and you’re good to go.
I dont know why you made an agressive response but whatever.
Screen space reflections dont give accurate and high-res results than cubemaps, it also dont give reflections outside of screen.
Reflection captures are similar. It is trying to give reflections with funny lightmap resolutions like 64x64 and it is static, so it is not suitable for every objects.
For large and important objects with accurate & hig-res desired reflections, cubemaps are better way to go.
I am not dying or butthurt or anything, just simply complaining and everyone has right to do some complains.
Hey caner_ozdemir -
Thank You for your thoughts. We are moving away from the older style of creating cubemaps as Martin said earlier because of complications the process of creating them caused in UE3, but we have added in UE4 the ability to directly use HDR images as Cubemaps.
The HDR images are created directly in Photoshop which when imported as HDR textures into the editor generate some very high quality cubemaps. Here is an example of one I created showing the St.Louis capital building. I am showing it with the Ambient Cubemap but you can also use it as a Specified cubemap in the sky light or as a component of a material.
In Photoshop you would want to go under File >> Automate >> Merge Images into HDR Pro and keep them 32 bit (Photoshop defaults them to 16 bit, but you can change that in the process). Also remember that HDR images are created from bracketed images which you can learn more about here which is also where I got the images for the cubemap I created.
Hopefully this will help you get back to the creation process, we would love to see what you get.
Eric Ketchum
Engine User Support
Wow, this is awesome! PS, I just answered my own question with the mip-level faking-roughness thing: by default, HDR images are set to no mipmaps which makes them very sharp, but you can double click the texture and change this to “Blur-#” to soften the image: blur 1 or blur 2 works fine. Then, in the material, at the top of the texture sampler, you can choose “Mip Level,” and a larger number will blur the texture and use a lower resolution, making it look just like you changed the roughness value if the reflection was realtime. Awesome!
It would be even better if we had the ability of controlling mip levels by parameters within material instance editor.
You can.
Set the HDR texture cube’s Mip Gen Settings to blur1. Then drag it to the material, and in the texture sampler’s details, set it to use Mip Levels, and hook up a scalar parameter to it. Hook up a reflection vector to the sampler’s UVs so the reflection maps properly, plug in any normal maps you wish to use to the reflection vector, and you’re done. You can make instanced parameters of that reflection to use different blur settings by simply raising the parameter (which somewhat mimics the roughness setting for realtime reflections). All the clouds in my image do this and are rendered completely unlit. Metallic materials multiply this reflection by a color/texture while non-metallic surfaces add the color/texture. You can use this to fake lighting on particles and translucent surfaces, or to just have access to the reflection in the material editor so you can do whatever you want with it.
Cheers.
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