Hi guys wondering if anyone can help I’m working on a lighthouse scene got a black sky with slight red and colouring coming from the horizon Its raining heavy bailey see the ground the direction light is around 0.02lux all looks great until Turning the fog up i need maximum density on the fog to get the effect and the god rays from the lighthouse… but this ruins all the work on the lighting as everything turns out really bright and looks like mid day in ibiza. All the insides of the buildings go really bright. The look is supposed to be late night… if anyone has any tips how to stop fog brightening every thing up ive tryed turning the fog colour to nearly black but then i loose the fog thickness grateful for any help
tuning the offset properties might help, but moreso in conjunction with the other properties getting modified…
can you post a screenshot of the main fog settings (both ExponentialHeight and Atmospheric)? and a shot or two of the scene as it currently is?
Thanks for your help will post a pic soon as i can (HARD DRIVE FAILED, CURRENTLY RECREATING SCENE) changing the color to a darker one just makes the fog thin out for me and losses the effect i want… as i need really thick fog to hide the bad guys running towards you until last second when they pop out the fog… think i can use a second fog up high on just the beams of light from the tower hopefully it wont light up everything then. a dark fog like your saying between that to make the scene stay dark thinking maybe another linked to the player camera?
As I think you can see, my fog is pretty thick. When you make it darker, you also have to compensate with the thickness… Best of luck with your HDD ( or is is SSD? )
yer your closest tree is where i want the fog to be like the buildings in the background The type you get when your driving and can bairly see the front of the car… dont know what i will do yet but will show when i suss it out
Fog being white inherently reflects light…which is why it is so dangerous to drive in and be out at sea ETC. So you will be fighting an up hill battle with lights in real world fog.
Without knowing the limitations of your scene, often you have to make compromises for artistic desire. So a couple of things you could try. (these may well affect frame rate ETC)
- Make a cloud/fog Material in the material editor and apply it to an Actor/some geometry and then have that blocking the view of the bad guys.
- Make a fog in Niagara or an Emitter and use them like smoke/dry ice machines on a movie sets, to blow fog in at the most relevant places.
- Rethink your lighting from the sky light or directional light to more situational pieces throughout the scene. You can then also control the amount of light in the scene as a whole with box triggers switching lights on and off…when a player enters one part of the map switch on X lights, when they leave and enter another area switch off X lights, turn on Y lights. This will stop the scene from being flooded with reflected and refracted light from far away sources.
- You could do a mixture of all those things.
Check out this video:
and this video:
You will struggle with a “realism” barrier and an “artistic” barrier most of the time in movies and games. Something looking cool might be better than something looking real. Decide what is more important the realism of light and fog or the scary nature of zombies/pirates or whatever popping out of the fog at the last second. (should be part of any good GDD) Then go with that, if you are going for a silent hill type game where fog is just absolutely everywhere then you could cheat the system a little and have an actor or mesh attached to the player character surrounding the player that looks like fog…something like a giant donut. As it is attached to the player it will follow the player everywhere they go creating a barrier to everything around them, only when something comes inside the barrier will the player be able to see it. This might not look super cool, but might keep your FR high while still giving the same “feel” of not being able to see further than X feet in front of you.
Hope it helps, all the best with it.