Community Challenge: Level Art [Oct 2015]

[Romulator]

I approve of this competition I look forward to when it starts

[Rapture]

We could try out making outdoor scenes with the new global directional lighting and terrain systems.

or

Practice vertical level design.

[Filizitas]

Sadly only HPL3 is allowed :c working on a system for Unreal 4 since 5 months now.

[TiManGames]

I hope I'll have time for that...

[Diago21]

Can't wait!

[WALP]

I'm interested in asking this before I spend all night doing it - would there be any interest in me going through every light/lamp in the game and removing billboards and pre attached lights from them to include in a folder for use in the competition (and elsewhere, of course)?

I'm very much willing to do this.

you mean you want to make light/billboard presets?

[Rapture]

@Robosprog - Do you mean the "EffectColorMul" property?

For "ceiling_large", you can change the billboard color attached to it, with that property. I don't know if every lamp model is set up correctly like this, but it is possible to change it.

[WALP]

@Robosprog - Do you mean the "EffectColorMul" property?

For "ceiling_large", you can change the billboard color attached to it, with that property. I don't know if every lamp model is set up correctly like this, but it is possible to change it.

Doesn't work on every one, I've tried. On top of that, billboards show up when the lamp is unlit, which is even more frustrating.



Here's an example of light changing but not bill color with effectcolormul.

Spoiler below!

I opened up that lamp in model editor. Turns out it's not because of the billboard being hard to change, it's because that lamp does not even have a billboard, the glow is coming from the material itself, and more specifically, it's illumination map.
EDIT:

Under appearance, changing the illum color will give you desired effect:

[WALP]

Man, thank god for that - saves me a fuck ton of time then. The problem with the bills still being active on some laps even after it being set to unlit persists though which is still a problem, but not worth bothering over.

Could you elaborate on which lamps are "some laps", one example should be enough. I originally checked the other lamp with a different solution in mind, but things turned out to be much easier luckily. Know that increasing the brightness of illum will increase the glow effect as well, so big glow does not necessarily mean billboard, only way to be sure is opening in model editor.

Still, I wonder why it's set to two different parts - whilst it's rather admittedly convenient if you need to have some kind of slightly different billboard or light, it'd be easier to just remove all lights from lamps in the first place. Having the ilum color and effect color be tied together could be an easy to do that way, and would make it more efficent when creating a scene.

That is because one setting modifies the lights billboards etc. which are attached to the entity, while the other modifies the illumination map which is a texture from the material, pretty different stuff tech-wise. Practically there is also a few situations where you will want there to be a difference between the glow on the model itself, and the color /strength of the lights and billboards. Fx you might want a powerful glow, without lighting up the surrounding objects like crazy, in which case you can keep illum high and EffectColorMul low. Some people might want to try some weird stuff as well, like having it glow in one color, and light in another:

[WALP]

Effectively, if you set the lamp to be unlit (It's too late to open HPL3 and wait another 3 mins to load it) on some lamps, the billboards will remain active even when light sources and ilum colour have been deactivated/set to 0.

I get that there is an issue, I was more hoping you could point me in the direction(give me the name) of one of the specific lamps that has this issue, might be able to identify a fix for it.

I understand the technical side of it more than well enough, but practically adjusting one to such an extreme whilst the other isn't is just unneeded and leads to bad results - it looks dodgy. In addition to this, lamps as an entity shouldn't really have any lights attached in the first place unless they are so small and specific they wouldn't make an actual impact on the scene - or, at the very least, have a no light version of every lamp.

Fair enough. Being able to adjust glow and entity lights's effect on environment separately, without having to place lights and billboards manually, seemed practical to me, but since you are the one most experienced with lightning, I will take your word for it that it is not enough control. Given we don't find a fix I guess we will just have to make no light versions of the one's that are broken when needed.