is there any way to get a light function to work with a light that uses a modulated lightshadowmode?

Is it possible to create your own screen effects (like someone mentioned vignetting earlier, and perhaps film grain, chromatic aberration, etc).

Originally Posted by Jonathan

Is it possible to create your own screen effects (like someone mentioned vignetting earlier, and perhaps film grain, chromatic aberration, etc).

Yes you can create a material that you can then apply to your screen via the post process chain.

Apologies if this has already been asked, but I didnt see it...

Is there any way to update/replace static meshes? My fav workflow in max is to block stuff out, and replace blockmodels with finished pieces one by one. I assume its possible in Unreal to place static meshes and then later replace the source mesh, thus updating all the instances in the editor... or do you really have to delete and re-position for every update?

-N

@Mechadus:

To update your static meshes just reimport the ase files into your package. As long as they've got the same name they will replace what you've already got in there. Since meshes in the level are just referencing the meshes from the package they get updated automatically. Just make sure you don't change the mesh's pivot location as that will mess up the placement of your meshes in the level.

Of course I dont try the most obvious way lol. Thanks Ben!

-N!

Originally Posted by Jonathan

Is it possible to create your own screen effects (like someone mentioned vignetting earlier, and perhaps film grain, chromatic aberration, etc).

as billy said, sure you can do it, if you know how it works you can just create a material set it up to be unlit and plug it in your own postprocess chain, in fact vignette was a nice point, airborn has it now ;)

Where can I get further information on creating your own postprocess chain? Using UT3/UnrealEd, that is.

ricgtclick in the package where you want it and create such a chain, you can add materials to it and also change the dof, bloom, color balance settings etc.
hacking it into ut without your own mod is a bit tricky and hacky and bad because it tends to crash, so a new mod with your data in it would definitely help you with that, then you can activate it in the utengine ini i think

Wow, cool, thanks!

I asked this question a little while ago in crazyfinger's thread, which was probably fairly rude.

My problem is that I want to be efficient with my UV space, but Unreal seems to not like this. If a shell is reversed and overlayed, the lighting is also reversed. I'm not sure if this just has to do with the normal map, but it shouldn't be effecting all the areas it does.

Here is an example of a chair prop I made a while ago, which I fixed the normal seam like shown in that tutorial thread here (so I doubt this is the problem):


(as you can see, the lighting is dark on one side and light on the other)

Is it a lightmap problem? I've seen Unreal props that reverse shells and it renders out okay.

Thanks for looking.

Hey cycloveried Unreal pretty much hates normal maps + UV seams, but mirroring can still be done. Have you baked lighting on that chair? Have you made a 2nd channel UV set for your lightmap bake? I believe you cannot mirror UVs in the lightmap channel. It may also be necessary to merge the those two shells in the lightmap UV channel.

EDIT: I forgot to mention one other thing, you need to mirror your UVs left-right not up-down.

Thanks for the reply Ben.

This is frustrating for me, because it seems like I'm the only one having problems!

So, I decided to do another test. This box is split down the middle, one side having a reversed shell (left-to-right // top-to-bottom). The texture is tile-able with diffuse/normal/spec. Channel 0 UV's are overlayed, while channel 1 UV's are not overlapping. Here are the results:





Inversed Top-to-Bottom UV's breaks it?

EDIT:

You need to split your lightmap UVs along the same seams made by mirroring on the 1st channel UVs.

Ignore this text, I'm just leaving it here so the conversation in the following posts makes sense:

Those are the lightmap UVs right? I think if you merged those shells it might work out ok.

You also need to mirror the triangulation for the parts of the mesh that will have mirrored UVs as well, if you're not doing it already.

It may sound strange but I believe Unreal also takes the orientation of the UVs into account when shading things.

EDIT:

Here's an example of mirroring UVs in Unreal.



EDIT 2:

This is what happens if you mirror your UVs the wrong way.

Ben - After testing both, it looks like the difference between mirroring horizontally and vertically is that the horizontal seam isnt as severe. On the UDN, however, they actually recommend you split the lightmaps at the mirroring seam. I tried this, too, and it reduces the specular seam with the slight tradeoff of a lightmap seam.



cycloverid - I had/have this problem and I got frustrated enough to just leave it be, however these two links explained a lot.

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/LightMapUnwrapping.html
http://gearsforums.epicgames.com/sho...php?p=26161072

It gets somewhat complex, but to quote the UDN: "In general, Vertex light maps are the only way to completely avoid a seam." There are obvious seams all over UT3, so to me that says you just have to deal with it, although you can minimize it somewhat. Blame Epic.

Here's a comparison of the object I had trouble with:

Thanks Slainean, cool info about the lightmap UVs. I really should read the updated info on UDN from time to time, the last time I went through it all was in late 2006 I had assumed that the lightmap UVs would be better if not split. I'll have to check this out.

Thanks to both of you.

Slainean: That first link is exactly what I was looking for! I had that favorited before, but I never got around to reading it and then lost it.

Thanks again.

Hey guys.

I've been using UED for some time now. It's quite a nice editor, sometimes a bit too old fashionable but quite enjoyable overall. However, I'm having a bit of a trouble with lighting. I modelled a few generic modular pieces to block out my level (sidewalks, cubes, walls, etc...) and they look terribly wrong when I throw in some simple lighting. I tried vertex lighting at first but some vertices which share the same exact space look either really bright or pitch black. They are quite tessellated and line up perfectly to each other, so it doesn't make much sense. I know the limitations of vertex lighting, I just wanted my pieces to be lit evenly :S

OK I then proceeded to lightmap those meshes. I also removed some of the loops as they weren't really needed anymore. The problem still persists though and my lightmaps also look pretty bad, with seams visible in some places and other places being lit correctly. Here's an screenshot of the lightmapped version:

Blue = Also happens in the vertexlit version | Green = UVs problems




A montage showing the UVs for the lightmapped cube and the same meshes prepared for vertex lighting only. At first I thought the lighting artifacts on the cube was due to the seams being too close to the UV's borders so I scaled them down a bit and they still look the same in the editor.


Does anyone know how to work around this?

One of the problems I see with your lightmap UVs is that they are too close together, the different shells need to be 3 or more pixels apart to avoid bleeding from each other.

Here's a nice light mapping tutorial by Stephen Jameson which explains the issue.

http://stephenjameson.com/tutorials/...-uvs-tutorial/

Originally Posted by Ben Apuna

One of the problems I see with your lightmap UVs is that they are too close together, the different shells need to be 3 or more pixels apart to avoid bleeding from each other.

Here's a nice light mapping tutorial by Stephen Jameson which explains the issue.

http://stephenjameson.com/tutorials/...-uvs-tutorial/

Ohh that's quite useful thanks a lot!

I stitched all my seams together because I read somewhere that the less seams the better. But it does not seem to be the case for lightmap uvs.

The vertex lighting inconsistencies still persist though.

Yeah I used to think so too, lightmap UVs appear to like seams. I need to correct the images in my previous posts so no one else gets led astray.

EDIT:

Ok, fixed up my example image and post.

Are there any other ways of getting UnrealED viewport images other than printscreen button? E.g. some hires shots of environments e.t.c

Yep, tiledshot enjoy!

Thanks Ben, exactly what I was looking for

Alright I was following the 3d buzz video tutorials and came across the same errors with vertex lit meshes I described above again. The funny thing is that 3d buzz's meshes look perfect.



This is really pissing me off