Yesterday I discovered a very expensive (>70€), expensive (GPU calculation; 5 lights) and imprecise (only plain generic colors) tool to do what I was searching for, so I decided to create my own custom Blueprint to illuminate any space from a screen. It consists of a plane (a TV, for example) with a texture (a playing video, for example), and a rect ligtht (stationary, with realistic baked shadows and super cheap) which will illuminate the scene with the colors and “shadows” comming from the content of the video played on the screen.
In advance, you can watch this quick video and screenshots:
Of course, it’s not perfect and light projections are not 100% correct, because of the “rays” calculation of rect lights (it’s the way they internally works), but anyway it brings a very convincing effect. In addition, you can control the blur of the projected lights and their brightness.
Please, feel free to comment. I will be really glad to know your opinion, specially if you can share what do you think about a target price and a better name
I have been working on a “high precision” version too. A very little more expensive but still very cheap, so we can switch between both modes.
Video with high precision selected:
Coming soon, a video showing the settings and the setup.
this looks even better !! cobgrats ! is it possible to achieve the effect without showing the real video on the screen. Just the light that spills in the room ?
kind regards
stucki
super !
just for adding atmosphere to some places, or spooky effects, where you see a shadow cast on the scene, for a short moment or so
is it possible to fad in/out the effect ? or is it on/off
I see. Yes, it could do that but consider that the source must be a video (so you may have a recorded cloudly moving sky and project it lights projected to the ground, for example. But notice too that it uses 3 Spot Lights -or a Rect Light in the “cheap” mode-, so they have an attenuation radius and they lose intensity the farther they are from the ground). Oh, another important thing to have in mind is that Spot Lights only project circular light, so some borders of panoramic videos may be “lost” outside the circle or constrained to a square format, to fit the circle the best (As shown in my videos, but usually nobody pay attention at that level to notice it), but corners of the videos will actually be always outside the circle.
Also, you can made your custom fade/out transitions too, yes, (obivously they are not included, as every user could have their own fade idea), so you can make them with the formula you want, or with timelines, simply modifying the intensity of the lights during the runtime; it uses 3 stationary or movable Spot Lights or 1 Rect Light, so you can modify their parameters through code as with any other light component inside a blueprint.
Thank you very much, @stucki and [USER=“3738446”]BolBol Egypt[/USER] , but finally Epic decided it hasn’t enough content to be added (obviously, it’s not a super-long code), even if being useful. Maybe I will publish it on Gumroad, like other tools I have.
