Ued Overbright Effects...

[Renzatic]

Is it possible to do overbright effects in the Unreal engine...or something similar?

Edit: For Example. As you can tell, the plain white texture just isn't cutting it and looks a little cheese. An overbright would be perfect here.

[Gingerbread Man]

Eeemage no wirkie.
But if I understand correct, you're wanting to make a shader, possibly with self-illumination / specularity... probably with SI / Spec masking as well.

Will be more helpful when eemage wirkie.

(edit=eemage wirkie)

erm... what exactly are you talking about?
The entire general feel? (up the zone ambient light)
The individual textures? (shaders)
The meshwork? (increase scale glow)

(edit2=d'oh wine)
The light thingie? Probably best to fake it out with a corona nearby, I think... I dunno. I see what you mean, but I'm not sure what effect you want to achieve. I'd use maybe twin lights (one to light, one to glow) and a zero light set for a corona... But, as I say, I'm not sure what you mean by Overbright.

[Renzatic]

Hmm..try and hit the link again, I forgot to add .jpg to the end of the url.

Anyway, an overbright effect. Think of a glare, where colors will bleed past edges and give it a harsh..uh..bright look to it. Farcry uses it full force, and it doesn't seem to be something that would be beyond UT2k3.

Best example I could google up is this..

http://fh1.telefragged.com/bigs_3.shtml

[mopgoblin]

I know bugger all about the newer versions of the Unreal engine, but one thing I realised a long time ago that applies to almost all computer-stuff is that plain white doesn't actually look bright unless there's something like a corona of almost-white around the edges (tends to look better if it's not a greyscale almost-white, too). Probably best to see what sort of corona-stuff is available (dunno whether it's possible to make one which looks decent on a light that shape), or failing that, you could try putting some almost-white pixels toward the edges of the texture. Coronas would probably look a lot better though.

[Renzatic]

Okay, I removed the black edges from the door and that did help out quite a bit...but the coronas (which is probably the same thing as the overbright effect) don't seem to do anything.

I tried doing the dual light approach you were talking about, but it didn't make any discernable difference. Can you not see it in the editor?

[Gingerbread Man]

yahr, I see what you're talking about, but I'm not sure what you want to achieve.

If the bleed is what you'r after, then baking adjacent mesh textures with lightmaps included will do a LOT for that. If that's not something you're interested in, then.. hrmm... see, the thing would probably be vertex-lighting. And there's no clean way around that other than using multiple light actors, unless you feel to fake it all with shader or baking.

Try multiple lights with varying intensity / radius for starters. Think of it like photography: Key lights, wash lights, fill lights etc... Play with Hue and Saturation, experiement with radii.

[Renzatic]

It's not perfect yet, but this is pretty damn close to what I was wanting...



It's seems to be a heavyhanded way of doing it, if I could find a way to distribute a constant source of light over a set area instead of playing with multiple lights it'd make this far, far easier.

And to see it ingame...clickeh

Thanks for the help, GBM and Mop.

[Gingerbread Man]

Is that white texture just a plain white thing? Or a shader with self-illum etc? Thing is that you can reduce the necessary immediate light if it's a self-illuminated texture (ie shader) without needing the very near / low radius / high intensity lights to glare the actual light panel up. Then you just need one or two medium (say, 16 or 24) radius lights with low saturation / hue / intensity depending on what you want.

[Renzatic]

It's a white texture I found in the engine subset fullbrighted with 3 (now 4, the topmost one is a spotlight I used for the lighting on the floor) low radius lightsources set close to it.

I was wondering about self illuminating textures and brushes...guess I need to read up on shaders some more to see what all they can do. From the sounds of it I really did take the long way around, guess I've still got a helluva lot left to figure out in Ued...

[Gingerbread Man]

Yeah, you really should learn about materials. There is SO much to do with them, not just unlit (sadly no longer a function in surface props in UEd3)

In fact, yesterday I built a complex oscillator / scaler / panner / specular material that made a hell of a good skin for rocks with water flowing over them... staggeringly satisfactory.

[Renzatic]

lol, I'm popping in my big ass tutorial DVD 'o fun right now.

[Ulukai]

Nice looking Alien Swarm stuff, BTW. It's got mood

[oRGy]

Looks good.

For "overbright" effects in my Thievery maps I just used multiple lightsources on top of each other. Well... no more than two usually. Just to get the Thief look right.

[Renzatic]

I figured that since I posted an update on Blackcat I might as well do it here, too. I'll also use it as an alterior motive to ask a simple question..

So here is teh map shawt

And here is the question:

I've been looking up faqs to see if I can find something about intersecting brushes, but can't seem to find the answer I'm looking for. As you can notice from the screenshot, I haven't done the gratework yet. The reason being is because I'm thinking of using just a single sheet for the center section, but I'm worried that intersecting the brush with the pillar in the center of the room might cause some problems. Should I just go ahead and seperate it into 4 sections and surround the pillar or just use 1 and cut through the base of it?

I've already had a few BSP errors rear their ugly head at me, don't wanna give the engine a reason to throw another one my way.

[Gingerbread Man]

Never intersect sheets... Don't intersect things with them, don't intersect them with other things. They don't have three dimensions, all hell will break loose.

Just jam the screen sheet big enough to totally cover and overlap everything, and build or place stuff through it. Don't forget to put a blocking volume the same size (well, it has to be 3d, but otherwise) just beneath the grate-sheet. Don't treat it like a collision hull from UEd2, because... well, you can, but I'm assuming you want a nice metallic sound for tramping feet on the gratework. For that you need the player to touch the texture, and the player can't do that through a blocking volume, yeah?

[Ulukai]

If you're feeling SUPER CREATIVE you could make the grate in Max or similar, to the exact dimensions that you need. That way, marines wouldn't fall through it, you wouldn't have to use nasty BSP sheets and performance wise it should be better too. Although, you could have trouble lighting it depending on where the vertices were.

[Renzatic]

Hmm...that isn't a bad idea at all, and it'd be easy to do, too. I might go ahead and try that out to see how it works.

[Gingerbread Man]

If you're going to build a large grating in Max, you really are going to want to bake light information into the texture... Normal vertex-based lighting on meshes is merely acceptable at the best of times, but it would be especially clumsy in a very large mesh with multiple lights acting on it.

[Renzatic]

Actually, using prebaked lighting could open up a whole set of possibilities I couldn't do within Ued proper. Alot of realistically contouring shadows could add alot of atmosphere to the map. All I'd have to do is make the grating, get it to cast a shadow on a flat wall, and make an alpha mask out of it.

lol, I might be getting a little too far ahead of myself here, though. This map was supposed to be my simple little maiden voyage with the editor, but since I'm now alot more comfortable with it I find myself doing alot of really funky and cool stuff. If I keep going I'll eventually go way past overkill.

[Gingerbread Man]

I'm not entirely sure what you just said about the alpha mask... However, I will press on with an elaboration which may be so exactly what you just said that you will LAUGH at I.

Regardless...

What I was talking about was to place appropriate omnis in Max to light the texture before you render it to a UV map... (and Render To Texture a complete map, unless you want to go the skin + lightmap route, which is probably better but is unreasonably annoying) The only problem with that is you HAVE to know where your lightsources in the UEd map are going to be, otherwise it's just going to look silly. Well, and the other problem is that it's then hard to reuse the mesh somewhere else unless a) you bake a new texture or b) make identical areas for it (note: I may be using the term "baking" entirely inaccurately)

As far as that alpha mask thing goes... umm... You really will have more luck, fun, and have better results if you use a projector for cast shadows. And those are really no trouble at all... Just remember that 128/128/128 is the shadow, and anything lighter is the light (I think that's how it goes)

So just reproduce the grate texture in greyscale, play up the gamma, play down the contrast, fuzz it up with a bit of gaussian blur, and voila: semi-instant projector. Alpha stuff doesn't work exactly the same anymore, not since UEd started using targas -- they can have an integral alpha channel, and that's what you seem to have to use for alpha masking, whether you're making a shader with opacity mask (or, actually, any kind of mask) or just a regular partially- or semi-transparent texture. You can't just import a greyscale and tick Masked anymore, if I remember properly. There ARE tickboxes for mask and alpha when you import (and in material properties) but the targa you import has to have a set alpha channel.

I'm 90% sure of that. I hope someone (Ulukai) can tell me I'm wrong, because it's an extra two steps to make the alpha mask in a targa and I'd much prefer to be able to simply tick a box. I don't think you can do that anymore, though.

[Ulukai]

Hrm, I think you're right GBM. Projectors are definitely a good way to go for shadows, and the mask import thang is fubar.

I've only had a brief play with trying to import mask textures as was done with UT99, it didn't work so I ended up attempting something funky in the materials editor which didn't work either. ho-hum. I really need to sit down with the materials editor one day and get my head around it.

[Gingerbread Man]

The materials editor is, surprisingly, a piece of cake. It's just SO robust that it's a bit overwhelming at first, but if you plan out your final texture carefully you really won't run into any problems.

[Renzatic]

Alright, this is what I've done so far...the one big room I've been showing bits and pieces of is basically finished cept for a few texture alignment tweaks I haven't ever gotten around to and a few tiny touchups here and there. And the rest of the map is getting done...slowly and surely.

I opted out of doing a static mesh for the grating this go-round, it and the walls are all BSP's...next map I do will have alot of custom static meshes.

But here are 2 of my most recent shots of it...one of an almost finished product (IE this is what it'll look like when I release the map 10 years from now) and the other is finished geometrywise, but I wanna tweak the lighting a bit more.

wo
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I have to say that I don't have Ued nearly as much as I used to...in fact I kinda like it a helluva lot better than Radiant now. Just took a few to get used to.

[Teh-Builder]

Unreal only adds lightning at each vertex point in a mesh, which means that you just have to add extra vertexes to make the mesh lit up correctly. If you were to make a big square box, and you didn't add extra vertex points in the middle of each side, it would just light up the sides in one color.
Add a fair amount of vertex points (number of segments per side), proberly somewhere between one extra segment for each 64-128uu and lightning should look just fine.
Granted, you won't be able to get the sharp lightmaps you can with bsp.

Anyways, my suggestion for adding the grate:
- Add a nonsolid sheet with the grate texture covering the whole area.
- Add a blocking volume inside the floor to do the collision work.

No bsp holes there.