My goal is to be able to detect the abundance or lack of light on an actor. The reason is because I’m making a game where there is an actor and if the actor has light cast on it, it turns off, if the actor has no light cast on it, it turns on. I am not familiar with lighting or rendering so I have very little understanding of the field.
I have come to this question because based on my limited understanding of this area, this is around about the right avenue. If I am incorrect please correct me.
The reason I am asking about how to read lighting data on the material instance is because it needs to be read dynamically at runtime with dynamic lighting and shadows. The Skeletal mesh that will visually represent the actor will have a specific part on it’s mesh that needs to read the lighting data and therefore will be a separate material from the others on the mesh, I assume. It will have 8 of these specific parts on the mesh and each will need to read lighting data independently from one another.
Now the only other idea, based on my limited knowledge, would be to read pixel data on the material instance before and after lighting is applied but I am not sure how to do this.
Any help would be really appreciated, thank you in advance!