How can i use my Emissive Material for Lighting? In UDK there was “Use Emissive For Static Lighting” option but in Rocket i cant find it anywhere.
I am curious about this topic after reading up everyones discussions on it on the various forums. My concerns are for static/dynamic translucent shadows and indirect lighting associated with these. From what I understand of whats said of emissive lights similar cons apply to the aforementioned also.
Ive been discussing this and the removal of SVOGI and how it affects alot of different techniques that were previously available that arnt anymore from UDK->Rocket. As I understand it we want to move forward with the techniques we use at the same time without sacrificing what we had previously which I feel is whats happening.
I dont have a huge issue with static lighting but it seems to be the limiting factor alot of the times, its obvious that a full dynamic approach is also out of the question. I think the biggest issue we face is the aging lightmap scenario, texture atlas’ can be extremely useful but I do believe photon maps are much better.
Photon maps would allow alot more manipulation to be achieved whilst still offloading a major portion of caching to a prerender and would add some extra processing at runtime but not the amount you would expect if the right steps are taken.
Right now we already see similar techniques used with inter-reflection and indirect lighting with ambient occlusion still be limited to an expensive post effect.
What Im proposing has potential to have the fidelity of an SVOGI method with the speed of lightmapping by using a more volumetric approach to storing lighting information (which can include spherical harmonics and perpixel prerender caching).
The adjustments would allow for textile depth on the fly as well as distance based lighting occlusion for large indoor sections all while saving on texture memory as the information can be better compressed than traditional bitmaps. This clever layering would also give a global scale of indirect illumination adjustment for inexpensive day/night cylcles being enhanced by real-time blending with dynamic lights through photon filters.
I’m very disappointed that this feature has been removed. It was really great. Yes, I see what the limits where, but it gave such a cool effect on static lighting.
Sorry, this feature has been removed. We had several problems with it and couldn’t make it work with the rest of the lighting features to a satisfactory level. Emissive lights through lightmass are always baked into the lightmap and therefore don’t integrate at all with characters / dynamic objects. They are not very controllable and don’t have any previewing at all. They are often hidden in complex levels as you can’t find them like a normal light where you would just search the scene outliner (stealth lights). They can explode lighting build times, depending on the polycount of the mesh that’s emitting. That said, they were pretty cool in small test levels so it’s a shame we couldn’t find a way to make them work.
Curious, what were you using them for that can’t be accomplished with the other light types? Maybe we can find another way to accomplish that.
I my self was hoping rocket might have made improvements for particle effects, in UDK i had a fire particle effect for a torch but had to add something like 90 lights into a map for each torch, but i had some separate lamps where i was using the emmisive off the glass to colour the lamps in a more realistic, almost soft lighting, sorry the image isnt great its the only one i can find currently, but you can see the lamps(in front of player and on the right in the distance) and why i would wnat a soft lighting off the glass hanging when it gets dark, i would otherwise need 2 lights per lamp to really make the graphics stay looking as good as they are.
EDIT. also im not sure of how to resize this image what tags can we use to do this for future posts? resized it hopefully that’s better.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/67958200/flair%20-%20Copy.jpg
You broke the forum!
UE4 particles have the ability to have lights attached to them. Check this thread for an example:
https://rocket.unrealengine.com/questions/1061/lit-particle-speculars-are-wrong.html
fixed the forum! return to boarding the rocket!
the particle lighting looks great will give it a try. 
Is it not possible to have emissive lighting implemented like how UDK/UE3 works and just have a possible warning for people about using them? Un-till the day that it may return in a better working state, I know you guys are working hard to make the engine the best it can be, and asking for things like this just adds to the bloat.
I’m afraid not, the maintenance burden of many small features that don’t work as desired really adds up for a large engine.
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Here’s an example of where the static emissive lighting would work well, and other solutions don’t provide quite the look I’d want:
I’d love to have the contact brightness with the concrete ceiling long the splines. I can understand the concerns you posted, but I’d like to find out how you’d suggest lighting this badboy. I could certainly spend hours placing lights all over it, but that seems like a bad workflow and wouldn’t necessarily work with the lighting system.
Thanks
After messing around, I also haven’t found a way to get this working, the material is lit, but doesn’t transfer the light to other meshs.
hmmm…Maybe they changed the name?
its possible that its hidden somewhere with all the changes to bring everything to the front of the engine rather than being hidden with in menus (f4/properties)
I am not able to try it just now, but if particles can emit light in UE4 why not emit non-moving particles off (some of) a mesh’s verts and use that as emission? It could provide a kind of dynamic lighting proxy that way.
After some more looking around the engine SphereReflectionCapture seems to give a similar effect to just being emissive. would it be possible to get this changed so that you can select which meshes reflect(so you would select your desired light “emissive” source) and keep a blank SphereReflectionCapture as is where it just does everything?
Now the issue with this is, on some of my meshes i have some parts that i would only want to reflect (multisubobject materials applied), so could this go down to the material level? it seems a bit more complex when if it was changed to work this way though.
In any case this to me seems the best way at the moment while we wait for some other solution and ill just use it and try apply tricks to fake things if/when needed.
This is very very bad news for me.
Removing this feature, technically I understand, but not providing an equivalent is a mistake.
What to I do with emissive : well for the past +1 year I based my lighting pipeline on emissive material and lightmaps.
I don’t use any light ever. 100% emissive material.
Very unique look and feel, very cool.
Now on EU4 I can’t have the same look, I am very annoyed, I must find a solution to this. Or I may have to stick to UDK, but…
I have subscribed to this post, and will report back when I find something.
Again disappointed, another feature, ridiculous that you do not have this engine, as well?
This post was made by a beta user back during the beta trials of UE4 and is no longer relevant. Any posts made by “UE4-Archive” are posts that have been archived from the beta reports.
This feature has since been added into 4.4 and can be turned on in the material’s properties. It is a checkbox labelled “Emissive Dynamic Area Light” and requires the use of LPV (Light propagation volumes). It is rather new and still a bit experimental.
I see that there are a few people seeing this post and getting confused. It is a beta tester’s report and is no longer relevant. It is being kept for archiving purposes.
This feature has since been added into the engine and can be turned on in the material’s properties. It is a checkbox labelled “Emissive Dynamic Area Light” and requires the use of LPV (Light propagation volumes). It is rather new and still a bit experimental.