Solved!-Render light over unlit material

!!!-SOLVED IN THE COMMENTS-!!!

Hi, I’m ussing the Blizzard emitter from the example Particle Effects, and I want to render my lights OVER the unlit particles from the emitter. The closest thing I’ve achived was using an emissive material with high strenght (witch looks pretty bad when I’m close).

Also, I would like some guideline to achive this effect: The lights should only being seen at X distance (if I’m close, it looks like a normal light, if I’m 5000 units away, it scales down to a dot. For a distance greater than 5000, you can’t see anything)
Close up:

Far away:

Desired effect (there’s small dot’s if you look the full size image):

You can make those lights actor BP’s and then calculate their distance to the player every tick(or every 0.1 second with a Timer.) Then adjust their intensity with that distance value by using a Map function. You can even add your emissive mesh&material into this BP and adjust it’s opacity the same way.

Thanks for your reply, I’ll try that.
On the other hand, won’t be easier something like rendering sorting (like, render lights firsts, meshes second, etc) or isn’t possible with UE 4?

I dont think that’s possible with lights. But it is possible with meshes, like emissive material stuff you had tried. You can render those “fake” distant light meshes on top of snow particles, and then adjust their emissive intensity and opacity with certain material nodes(getting the distance to the camera inside the material and using it as a multiplier for opacity should work.)

I got the distance stuff, but no how to sort the mesh above the particle mesh in the materials. It’s opacity stuff also or opacity mask the way to go to sort them?
Thanks for your answers!

You’ll need to disable Separate Translucency in snow particle material. But it just occurred to me that when you do this the snow will render behind every translucent material. I’ll think about it and post here if i find another solution if this doesnt work out for you.

What about the Translucent Sort Priority? If I recall correctly, the particle material is Translucent, so changing the priority may work. I can’t test anything until tomorrow, anyway, thanks for thinking about my issue :slight_smile:

Oh yeah! Good thinking. I completely forgot about that. :slight_smile:

Found a better solution for me, I’ve used an emissive material in a mesh, and, with a Cull Distance Volume I can “hide” the light :slight_smile:
I don’t know if it’s cheaper (in processing terms) the culling solution or the bp, but this is exactly what I wanted :slight_smile:

It is cheaper. I was thinking of ways for soft transition, but if culling works for you then that’s fine too. :slight_smile: