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Have questions about setting up lighting in your environment? This is the stream for you! Anton and Jordan will cover different lighting techniques, including examples from Paragon, for how to update your map for different lighting scenarios and practical lighting suggestions for getting your game to 60 fps!
We are also kicking off our Spring #ue4jam at the end of the livestream! The theme will be announced, preceded by some additional rules details.
Missed the announcements for these last few streams on the Epic Games Launcher! Used to always be on top of the front of Community but don’t even see a notification for this one at all. Glad I missed it? Er… (angel)
I really do wish the Epic Launcher would include just like one panel just to show what the next stream is going to be. I keep checking it expecting it to be there as part of the blog, and totally missed this one because I suck
Anyway, I do have a couple of artistic lighting questions.
I’m only using dynamic lighting, no static. I have a day/night system, using only blueprints… and two directional lights (sun and moon). There’s also some cool stuff I did with stained glass but that’s besides the point. You can check out my system on my youtube channel. I’m live almost every day if anyone wants to discuss.
a) When using a Skylight for indirect light, what’s the best way to change it at run time? I know you can trigger “Recapture skylight” in blueprints at run-time, but as far as I can tell, you can’t really c-interp it (unless you did it on tick with a huge cost). Every time I run “Recapture skylight,” the frames hitch significantly so runninng it anywhere close to on tick seems like a misuse. So I’m using the LPV indirect lighting instead and getting some great results without as much of a cost. But how should I use Skylight at runtime? It’s much prettier :}
b) I’ve pushed my skybox out (using 10x scale on the actor) for clouds and I added a second skybox even further out (100x scale) for stars. I have a static mesh moon in between them that orbits the scene and is illuminated by the directional light, which is pretty cool 'cause it gives natural phases and doesn’t seem to cost too much. My question is, with the skyboxes pushed out this much (any closer and I see weird clipping issues on the moon, based on the peripheral vision - so a fix for that would be nice but I’d lose the vastness of the ocean)… anyway, with the skyboxes pushed out this much, I’m actually seeing a yellow circle where the directional light is, in addition to the sun created by the Skybox material. It’s not terrible, except for the fact that it shows IN FRONT OF the moon. The skybox material sun goes behind the moon, but this little disc is always visible. If I move the moon close enough to step in front of the skybox, the circle disappears, but again, I get weird clipping/coloration issues on the moon (after putting the skyboxes into their respective closer positions) unless everything is pushed way out. Funny thing is, if I push the offending skybox out to match the moon, the moon clips in front of the skybox, but the yellow disc is still there! When I disable the directional light, the little yellow disc disappears.
I remember on this stream there was talk about how the directional light is captured in reflection maps. Is this the reason how? Is there some way to just disable that little yellow circle or some tips for dealing with the clipping issues? Here’s some pics…
You can see the sun with bloom on in the editor, which slightly masks the disc when graphics options are set above medium. You can see the little disc itself with no skybox sun, and you can see the skybox sun and directional light disc (?) together in-game.
I tried to capture an image of the moon “eclipsing” the skybox but not eclipsing the “directional light disc,” but my system isn’t as awesome as Fortnite’s so I have to actually sit there and wait for them to line up in-game
It would be nice if the engine had some tools to do some of this for us. Analyze where the shadows fall and generate custom UVs to boost texel density near the silhouettes. Find where there is lots of variation in the indirect and automatically increase lightmap density on those assets. Or allow SDF shadow map textures themselves to not load in as much data by using sparse textures to only load the silhoutte portions at the higher res mip levels:
Hiya, I have been attempting to recreate the Blueprint mentioned at ¬12mins into the stream but had no luck getting the panning to work on all three axies (resulting in the columns of fog you see below). I then attempted to make the Pseudo Volume textures as per Post Page but it resulted in a uniform set of points. Would it be possible to get some more info on how the Blueprint mentioned in the stream works or a download? Thanks very much
