Hey guys.
I have a quick question on how to properly use interior lighting for a game.
Now let’s say your game is made of repeating hallways. You surely couldn’t put a light in each hall right? I mean that would be like 200+ point lights… that’s too much…right?
How would you light something like this properly?
See, would you just max out a point light and put it all the way above the map, lighting the entire scene?
Would you create multiple low value lights to put in each hall?
I’m just not really sure what the most optimal way to do this is…
Thanks in advance,
~ Jason
Depends on what it looks like. You can make some nonspecific lights and use emissive lighting, if it looks OK and people don’t notice unless they’re really looking for it then that works. If you really wanted to you could place all of the lights. You can have as many static lights as you want, since it’s all prerendered.
Hey.
Thanks for the response.
I forgot about static lights being pre-rendered!
Now what is this “emissive” lighting you’re speaking about.
I know for a fact I’ve heard about it, but I just never really understood it.
Can you give me some insight?
Thanks,
~ Jason
At the moment all it is is a texture effect that makes part of the texture look like it’s glowing. For instance like buttons on a control panel. For lights you would use an emissive value in your actual light mesh material so that it looks like the light itself is glowing (like the lightbulb). In UDK it also had a feature where it would try to actually create illumination onto the map from emissive textures, but that feature is not available in UE4. It’s likely at some point that you’ll be able to use emissive materials as a part of lightmass when you build your static lighting, but it’s not available yet, right now it’s just for adding a glow effect to materials.
You know this is why I love Game Development.
There’s always something new to learn.
Thanks for the information! Really interesting stuff!
~ Jason