So I have this sign that has steel lettering, I have a nighttime scene so I want the steel lettering to be back lit.
I figured, “well I should be able to do it with a material that gives off light, and applying it to the back faces.”
Except in practice it turns out that Unreal doesn’t work like that. I currently have my glow y material applied to all the side faces of my lettering but it still isn’t
giving me the look I want,
Does anyone have a way to back light lettering in Unreal?
Can you just make a light in the shape of the lettering? Anyone? Im sure there is any easy answer.
Hi Ajvilla,
Backlighting can be handled in a few different ways inside Unreal Engine 4.
Here are two examples tjhat may help you out:
1) Emissive as Static Lighting.
If you plan on using statically baked lighting this is a good one to use for quick results and minimal setup.
With this setup I have my text static meshes with two material IDs. The main material that will be the front and the back is a simple emissive material. The top part of the image show the emissive back part. The bottom picture shows the final results from this.
To enable this you simply need to select the mesh in your scen and in the details panel enable the option for “Emissive with Static Lighting”. Then when you build lighting it will use the emissiveness of the back material to light your scene. The power of the emissiveness will determine how bright it is when the lighting is baked. Also, to get the best results, you would want to increase the lightmap resolution of the mesh that the emissive material is being cast on to. In your case, the wall behind your backlit mesh would need a higher resolution. Lower resolutions will result in more artifacts or blocky looking lighting. On this wall I’m using a 1024, although a 512 resolution looks good as well.
2) Placed Static Lighting and hollowed mesh.
In this setup I’ve got the same mesh, except it does not have back faces for the mesh. This is using a two-side material, and has numerous lights with lower intensity and radius’ placed inside the mesh to help build out the lighting. You can see all the lights in the top part of the image, and the bottom part shows the results. Since all these lights are static and being baked into the lightmap there isn’t really any expensive cost for using them in this manner.
Backlighting Project: [TestProject][3]
