How do I set up textures in UE4 that have dynamic emissive light properties?

Development Rendering
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1

I want to recreate the temporary bat-cave from The dark knight
http://media.dcentertainment.com/sites/default/files/2008-the-dark-knight-2.jpg

I want to be able to step into the room and trigger turning on the lights so they slowly turn on and cast this type of light.

Is there anyway to do this? This type of lighting creates a very diffuse look which I really like, hardly any sharp shadows.

Thanks!

2

It should be do-able buddy, maybe try have a play around with Skylight and try point lights and tweak the properties. Without having a dig around myself I can’t give you exact details, but if I come across anything I’ll post back!

3

I think you can achieve that lighting and avoid light reflections by giving the lights you use a high value for Min Roughness(under Light tab when you select your light.)

4

Just to be clear, here is a small animated GIF I mocked up to demonstrate the effect I want.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/761305/dark-knight-blu-ray1-(1).gif

Note: I dont want to use spotlights since they reflect as small dots so it would look a grid of small dots in reflections.

5

The amount of dynamic lights needed will cripple any PC

Is there a way to render out multiple light-maps and switch between them realtime (animate like my example above)? as far as I can see, that might give me the best result. Although I have no idea how the objects in the scene will be lit with such a solution.

I really wish UE4 has dynamic global illumination in combination with receiving light from textures. (the last appears to be removed - I remember such a function being available in UDK, but not in UE4)

I also toyed around with the beta dynamic GI that you can enable but without it being able to receive light from textures its pretty much useless.

6

Does UE4 not allow lighting from emissive materials? As I know UDK did, I was going to say try making a bunch of ceiling panels and give them an emissive white material and use that as lighting.

7

I want to do something similar, created a material where a scalar value parameter can be set to 0 or 1 to turn the emissive color on and off. My last problem is that I want it to be an event in the level logic, but I can’t figure out how to fetch and create a dynamic material from world brushes to set the parameter…

8

Check this tutorial out it should give you a good idea on how to do this.

9

Hi cdrose,

Emissive materials do not technically produce light, they produce bloom in the form of a “glow”. Here is more information about emissive lighting: Content Examples Sample Project for Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.1 Documentation. Having said this, emissive lights CAN affect the light propagation volume. Check “use emissive for dynamic area lighting” in the details panel to activate this feature.