May as well turn this into a thread with all of my troubles, as there will be many to come. The thread title lets people know if something they read last week has been solved this week, or if there are new issues. Help is welcome if you have the time or have done something similar to what I'm talking about, or have even some ideas on things I might try?

1.Strange lighting on terrain? (Solved)

Would anyone know what's causing this?


I've played with settings for the terrain object and the light, but every time I rebuild lighting it puts a black rectangle there.

There was a Semi-Solid plane which I'd used for water in the basin which was casting a shadow. I have since replaced with a static mesh plane and it's fixed.

2. Give ammo to player via Kismet? (Solved)

I want to have my own material on weapons and ammo pickups for this project, so what I've done is place a static mesh for the rocket launcher, overwrite the material then use 'destroy' and 'giveinventory' to disappear the mesh and give the weapon. But for ammo this method doesn't work, as ammo is not in the dropdown list of items you can award to the player. I'm wondering how else to do it.

Finally got it, after much trial and error. I placed an ammo actor on top of the static mesh and set this to toggle invisible on level startup. Then a separate event "Touch Status" for the ammo actor, 'touched' is wired into a destroyed action object with both meshes (as variables) wired to the input node. I might be able to replace this method with a script later, but for now this does what I need.

3. Blending animations for custom weapon? (Semi stuck, but some ideas to try.)

I don't think anyone here knows or can help with this, but I'll mention it again anyway. I'm wondering how to make an altfire animation blend between three states. Ie. player turns hand and gun sideways, then fires a shot sideways, then the gun and hand turns back to normal. I've made the animations for these three movements, but have no idea how to 'drive' them in a script or animtree ... or even if an animtree should be used?


4. Lens Flares? (Solved)

I've added them to my level but don't know how to control the brightness and scale based on distance. I want them to get smaller and dimmer the closer you get, but the default setup seems to be the other way around (dimmer further away, bright up close). Could not find _any_ tutorials on how to edit properties or play with the curve editor, I've tried the trial and error approach but I have no idea what I'm doing.

In the LF editor under source element, near the bottom is a category called "DistMapScale". I changed the distribution to "DistributionVectorConstantCurve", and added a few points.

[DistMapScale]
Point [0] InVal: 256.000000, OutVal: 0.000000 for x,y,z.  (This makes the flare invisible at less than 256 unreal units away.)
Point [1] InVal: 1000.000000, OutVal: 1.000000 for x,y,z. (Between 256 and 1000 units away, the flare grows from a scale of 0 to 1.)
Point [2] InVal: 5000.0000000, OutVal: 0.000000 for x,y,z. (Between 1000 and 5000 units away, the flare shrinks from a scale of 1 to 0.)

"InVal" is the distance from your camera to the flare, while "OutVal" controls the scale. I did not touch Arrive or Leave fields, and it looks like Epic doesn't bother with those fields either.

[Bounds]
bUseFixRelativeBounds=true (ticked)
[FixedRelativeBounds]
Minimum: 4.000000
Maximum: -4.000000

In the tests I've done, smaller numbers seem to give more accurate occlusion, and prevent a flare from shining through say, a pillar, or the pole of a chainlink fence. Higher numbers have given me better results for outdoor areas like foliage, where a texture plane might be at such an angle the flare thinks it has to be hidden behind it but should be allowed through. I decided to duplicate my flare and have one for indoors (4,-4 bounds) and one for outdoors (16,-16) to get the best of both worlds.


5. Grass lit at night time? (Solved)

The grass material in the stock ut3 package "UN_Foliage" is emissive, so I copied the material setup to my own version to make it diffuse. This stops it being bright green outside with night lighting, but now the back faces of the grass are dark and looks terrible. A dynamic light fixes the problem, but I cannot tell it to light only the grass layer in the terrain object. If I try to use ambient lights, the whole scene becomes too bright.

I made a copy of the grass material, diffuse instead of emissive, masked and non-directional. In doing this I noticed another issue with thin strips of bright grass on the y axis, but turning on 'usedirectlightmaps' and doing a full rebuild made this issue disappear.

-- Edited by Winter Dragon on Thursday 13th of September 2012 02:33:12 PM