First person parented lights problem

Development Rendering
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1

Ok, so I have a helmet with a translucent visor, the helmet also has some lights parented to it (woooo space helmet)

anyway. while walking I am getting flashes not unlike those from the newer star trek movies across the inside of my visor from the lights. (this is “cool” and everything but i think 5 or 6 hours of this could get more annoying than it is in a 2 hour star trek movie)

so while the visor needs to be lit by world lighting and some internal helmet lights, is there a way to specifically disable my parented light’s ability to light that specific mesh?

I don’t really want to have to disable lighting or do some kind of hacky method of blocking the light with hidden meshes. so would love a good solution.

Thanks :smiley:

2

Found a possible solution by disabling lighting on translucency but this will cause issues with any glass I have in the game world. :<

3

Hi Fenrix,

There is no way to use light channels like there was in UE3/UDK. You cannot disable a specific mesh from receiving light. This is because of how light is rendered now using deferred lighting.

Depending on how your setup is, you could probably achieve something with materials by not having the material for the visor be affected by light by changing it to “unlit.”

Thank you!

Tim

4

hmmm, I would except the helmet has internal lights which reflect off the face of the visor.

this is happening with spotlights by the way, is there some way of making it so that the spotlights do not cause this kind of bounce.

when translucent lighting is enabled on the spot lights my visor periodically flares with this setup.

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what the setup looks like and
pov with translucency on the spotlights off, with it on, it is blindingly bright where my scratches and scuff marks are.

any ideas?

5

There isn’t any way to have the spot lights not affect specific objects.

A way around with this probably (I have not tested, just theorizing here from what should work) would be to have your character be a mult-sub-object that uses multiple materials. The material for the Helmet could be set as two sided. This should take light only from the inside of the helmet. Again I’m not sure since I have not tested this or have a material setup to do so at the moment.

Give this a shot and let me know if this helps!

Tim

6

I ended up re-building the visor to have an inner and outer face, but while its not getting lighting from in front, its still getting odd flashes.

I thought originally they were caused by gaps in the helmet mesh (the visor is seperate from the helmet back so we can do things to it)
but after making sure no light could possibly get in through a side gap, it still gets lighting errors.

I couldn’t say for sure but I think there is a lighting bug with lights parented to a skeleton. the lights are at some point between frames, not sure where they are facing and as a result odd flashes occur on reflective or translucent surfaces of any mesh within the hierarchy, Ill look into it and see if I can’t narrow it down a little.

(I’m fairly sure this is the case because I parented a spot light and moved it several thousand units away and pointed it in the opposite direction to the mesh, then added a button to turn it on or off. the light when on was still causing odd flashes when out of sight and even when inside map geometry. when off, there was no flashes occuring on the visor.)

(have not tested with a different model so it could be a model issue I guess, but I have rebuilt the whole helmet twice since starting so. I don’t even)

other than that, world lighting and moving lights not contained within the character blueprint seem to work exactly as they should :frowning: