Modo has mesh painting tools where you can paint with textures etc. it has some of the best tools I have used in the 3d world especially for modeling. The only thing I don’t like about Modo for Archviz is the render engine, I prefer Cycles in Blender, Carona and other unbiased engines. And, the only reason I even started down the road on UE4 was that it doesn’t take a huge render farm for animations. That said if I can’t crank out work in a certain time frame it’s of no use.
Because for those who come from a game graphics background, “emissive” means “take these pixel colors and add them to the framebuffer where it paints” – it does not mean “and spill that color all over the surroundings in whatever way you see fit.”
You are right, there are multiple different disciplines (architects, military simulation, movie production, video production, games, commercials, …) and they all have different workflows and nomenclature. This is not strange, bad, or unexpected – it’s how the world works.
You can either decide that you are a “pure X” for one value of X, and use tools aimed exactly at X, OR you can decide that you want to be a little bit of everything, and then start learning the specifics of each area. The best thing you can do is then to dive into the new areas, fully expecting to have to learn new names for things, and new ways of doing things. The benefit of doing so is that, at the end, you likely gain more insight into how the original thing you first trained on actually works under the hood, which may let you achieve better results overall. It is, however, a lot more work
You’re coming across as someone who once used device specifically made to calculate tips when eating out and later was introduced to a calculator for the first time. “Why do I have to enter the sales total, press multiply, enter the sales tax and press equals? Why isn’t there just a calculate tip amount button? That would be much more intuitive.”
While your statement is true for you in that situation. Surely you can see the benefit to having a general purpose calculator. The same is true of UE4. It is consciously designed to be a general purpose game engine. When you look at it that way it becomes very intuitive.
Emissive materials are mostly a post effect… They don’t cast light rays that can bounce off surfaces and all. You need to put a spot or point light to have this effect. Emissive is just eye candy afaik. I use them to texture lightbulbs or neon but you still need a spot light to have real illumination.
Intuitive would be to have an option to turn “off” emissive that effects the world not the way it is now. I have 2 other 3D rendering softwares and have used several more and they all have the emissive material cast light into the scene.
Ok looks like I have it all wrong. from official doc :
‘‘Unreal Engine 4 now has the ability to use the Emissive input in your Material to help illuminate the world. To enable this functionality, all you have to do is make sure that you have something going into the Emissive input in the Material and then place that Material on an object in the world. After you build the light, you should see that static objects in the world now look like they have been illuminated by the Emissive input of your Material. Here is an example of using a yellow Emissive light to illuminate a dark part of our testing level with yellow light.’’ only works with 4.6 + version
and Use Emissive for Static Lighting is a way to turn that illumination on/off
You probably need a high multiplier if you want your emissive material to really affect your world. But you could do some quick tests and tell us
Which brings me back to why isn’t it casting light into the world and the option there to turn it “off” Hahahahaha Where I grew up you turn on a light and it lights the room.
Anyhow, the developer asked me to tell them what I found unintuitive and that’s what started this. The opinions expressed are solely my own.
What I would like the most is a temporary global lightmaps override. Like material override in vray. That way we could do quick light test with low res lightmaps and when you turn it back, everything goes back to their respective resolution. Cause lightmaps is what kills lighting build the most and when your scene start being full of stuff it’s almost impossible to do quick light test even with the lowest settings.
You’re comparing offline rendering packages like 3DSmax and Blender to a real-time game rendering engine. Offline renderers allow users to focus on “what” makes up a scene. With real-time rendering developers have to be more involved in “how” a scene rendered because they constantly have to make trade-offs across performance, memory and visual quality.
I can understand that logic, I guess they have it set up for performance first and quality second. I find I’m having to constantly search for ways to improve the quality and that’s because my style of Archviz requires photo realism.
The reason it’s not the default setting to have it enabled is that for one it’s a new feature, and the other thing is that it increases lighting build times.
You have to remember that UE4 is primarily a game engine, and it’s targeted for that purpose. It’s only recently that people have started really using it for Archviz so some workflows may change to accommodate that but in some cases you’ll have to learn how to use the software.
Not really. Actually calculating that is pretty expensive, and can’t really be done at runtime on current hardware.
Because Unreal is focused on, first and foremost, real-time interactive graphics, the defaults are suitable to that use case.
The reason you can turn on “treat emissive as light” at all in the editor, for static lighting computation, is that the additional hit to computation that happens during light baking isn’t so bad – light baking already takes a very long time.
The draw-back is that any dynamically lit object (characters, or anything else that moves) will not be “lit” by that emissive surface, which will look wrong.
Thus, most people who want the effect, put a small spotlight right behind the emissive surface, and give it a small radius, to emulate the effect of the lighting. And, when you do that, it’s better to use that light for static light computation (it blends more with the world.)
Again, you sound a lot like someone who has only ever used one particular kind of tools in one particular kind of setting, and haven’t yet realized that when you go to a new setting, learning that setting from scratch is better than assuming that the world will look like you’re used to. You will have a much better experience if you approach this with a bit more of an open mind, I think.
Oh, and that’s another thing that’s not “intuitive” to people who aren’t used to real-time graphics: one-sided surfaces. The fact that you can put a light behind a wall, and it won’t be shadowed by that wall, because the wall is invisible from the other side, is super normal to those used to graphics with back-face culling, and it allows a lot of effects in real-time that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
I’m a new user in the Architecture field the developer asked for feedback good or bad, what they choose to do with it is their business, the comments are meant for them. If you don’t like my opinions too bad, it wasn’t meant for you anyhow. Try and learn where the boundaries are.
Another tidbit of information about emissive lighting in UE4:
Emissive lights only emit one single pass of direct lighting, there is no bounce from the light that comes from emissive and that is due to it being more expensive to calculate.
So in the majority of cases, we choose to NOT use the emissive lighting and instead manually place a light source (or multiple) and adjust things such as the source radius and source length to control how the light falls off. In general, you get a much higher quality result by doing that compared to using “emissive for static lighting”. “Emissive for static lighting” is a neat feature to turn on in some cases, like maybe if you have a logo that needs to glow and the lighting pattern is VERY specific. But in general we will opt to use manually placed lights in order to get bounce lighting and more control.
If you start thinking of using emissive lighting + also using direct lights to get bounce, yes you can go that route but it gets super tweaky since you have to set the indirect lighting intensity on your lights to be greater than 1 and then turn the brightness down so that you don’t over-do the direct lighting component.
