Hello. This is a bit of a weird one but I’m wondering if there’s a node that lets you get the lighting that’s on the object using the material. Like say if there’s a shadow being cast on the object or the object is in a dark room so it would return a black value where the shadow is and a white value where there’s light.
If you still don’t get what I mean, imagine going into ‘show lighting only’ mode, is it possible to have that kind of view displayed on a material.
I’m trying to make a glow in the dark material, so if anyone knows a better way please share.
Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) UE uses a rendering system called deferred rendering. It first renders all the properties of the materials on the screen into different buffers and then for each light in the scene additively renders the lighting information into one final image. Because of this during the execution of your material, you have no idea where the lights are and thus such a node can’t exist.
If you want a glow in the dark effect, you can assign the glow color into the emissive slot of your material and enable bloom in your post processing volume: Bloom in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.1 Documentation
Without Bloom it would still be visible in the dark, but it wouldn’t have that super glowy effect. Try to increase the value of your emissive color beyond 1 to have a strong effect.
And if you want the object to ONLY glow in the dark you would need to lighten up the rest of your scene so much that the glow of the object is dwarfed. Since UE is heavily based around realistic rendering there is no easy way to achieve some unrealistic shading effects.
I’m not sure why I didn’t just think that a low emissive colour would work as glow in the dark. Light enough to show in the dark but not bright enough to look like a light. Thanks.
Did this ever get resolved in terms of workarounds? I understand that UE4 allows you to do forward rendering (where it should be possible) - however, I have to admit when I changed over I started having all sorts of problems with even simple materials not being able to be saved.