A couple of years ago I shared a light animation i made in UE and a lot of people have been asking about it since. Finally made some time to tidy things up and add a couple of functionality to it and now i’m sharing it with you all.
Earlier version was sequencer driven only but this one uses both sequencer and the audio engine functions. Basically you’ll need 3 actors: spotlight, target and audio BP. You can see how they work together in the video(though i didnt touch the audio BP much)
Audio BP can have as many groups of spots as you’d like as you’ll see in the project, you just need to add the same logic you’ll see there for each new group. Then you can trigger those sound intractions via sequencer or any way you like.
I will continue to add more to this project(smoke particle light shafts, lasers, etc. but i’m not promising any timeline. Feel free to post your requests, questions(tried to comment as much as i could) and/or whatever you do with this project. I’d love to see them!
Hey Owl! Thanks for letting me know. I dont know why it happened, but it should be fixed now. You can directly download from the link.
Please let me know if it doesnt work again and i’ll find another place to upload.
This looks exactly like what I am looking for, for a project I am looking to do but only on a larger scale. The issue is our project does not run with distance fields and will not.
I am simply after a way to easily draw and manipulate spotlight beams without the horrible volumetric effects produced by lights in the engine.
This is an example of the sorts of effects I need:
We do not need particularly fancy effects just beams really that we can customise the shape, diameter, brightness etc and have them be easy to program.
I tried to use the spotlights in my project but I am still getting the bad pixellation in volumetric effects as shown here:
@djd711 you dont need to use mesh distance fields. It was just experimentation to somehow, at least partially, block the light shaft. If you dont need it then check out the light shaft material, disconnect distance field stuff, plug depthfade instead and thats it. Volumetric fog is unusable for this kind of thing unfortunately as vol. fog leaves traces behind for a couple of frames when you have fast moving/intensity changing light sources, and you’ll have blocky results with thin light cones, all limitations of volumetric fog.
So, you can easily achieve the system in the video you shared with my project without distance fields. Light shaft updates its color with light source color so you’ll need to animate the spot head(with a target actor), light intensity and light color, which makes 3 tracks per spotlight in sequencer(4 if you want to play with angle too.)
@moianminh2 lasers are in my to-do list. Off the top of my head i’d start with niagara beams. The other day i got an idea with procedural meshes too, both for normal light shafts and lasers, still havent tried it though.
@ Thanks I have been mostly able to get the effect I am after however I have noticed that the beams are barely visible from a front angle compared to the sides or back as shown here:
How can I change this and make the beam more evenly visible from all angles?
Also about 50% of the time when I launch my project, the lights give me this error and do not respond to my rotator components:
@djd711 the reason i made them to fade at direct angles is to prevent the “fins” from being too obvious. I may have overdone it so you can adjust it via Exponent and Fract parameters in M_NiagaraConeMat_Inst. Increase Exponent, decrease Fract.
About the errors you are getting, i’m not sure why that is happening. Are you using a rotating movement component inside the spotlight BP?
@ Yes I am using a rotator, not directly inside the BP but added as a component in the target. Just a quick and dirty to way to program an offset effect.
I will eventually be programming within sequencer so this shouldn’t be an issue by then.
If you have a tip on how to prevent the error in the mean time though it would be handy as whenever the error happens, the rotators do not work.
@djd711 rotating the target doesnt have any effect on the spotlight by default unless you make it so in the blueprint that target actor’s rotation also sets the yaw of the spotlight(or whatever parameter you want to change). If you’ve set this up please share a screenshot of your code as well because even if you set the rotation it shouldnt care about spot emissive material parameter really. :
Also make sure the spot heads have that material(SpotEmitMat) and all the dynamic material instance variables are set properly.
Hey,
I downloaded your Light Show for UE4, First of all I want to thank you for sharing and I have to write that I really like your light setup with Niagara,It works better, It looks elegant done and doing really nice effects. My question is, can we use your light setup in our commercial project ?. Thanks
@TRBT You can freely use the project and its contents in your commercial and non-commercial projects. Just please share whatever you do with us. I enjoy seeing what others do with projects i share.
Hi! First of all Thanks @, great project! I wonder if there is any workflow to manage the migration of your project to another one. After migrating your’s project to one I’m working on I get working light but there is no beam between the headlight and the spot. Any thoughts on that? I’m using the 4.25 engine and also have the same result using your level map after migration.
@furek looks like some modules have been deprecated in 4.25. If you open the original project in 4.25 everything works regardless of warnings in the emitters but somehow wont work if you migrate to a new 4.25 project. You can open the system but if you want to open N_BeamCone emitter the editor crashes. :\
The easiest solution right now is create a new emitter, open the system and create the same emitter by looking at the ones inside the system, then replace the emitters inside the system with the new one. Inside the system Beam Width > Beam Twist Amount parameter is the only thing that is different for each of the emitters, so it should be easy once you recreate the emitter.
Your old fan here :))
Thanks!
