Ligthing single objects

[Foo'bar]

Hi there,

I was playing around with a map and I was asking myself how to darken the wooden bunker without change the environment's lighting. Possible?

[Murphy]

Hardly. You can try reducing his "GlowScale" or "AmbientGlow" below 1 (I don'T know how it is called exactly anymore, because I tried these things a few times but they never worked for me in similar situations as yours). They are practically the only thigns with "Glow" in the name in the "Display" section of the thing's properties.

What I did with some ice-stalagtites/stalagmites was to take their texture into a colormodifier and simply darken it.
To do that, open the texturebrowser, create a new texture in the creation select "colormodifier". Then open the colormodifier's properties and assign the texture you used for the bunker to it (if there are more than one, you need more color modifiers) and then darken it down.
Then go to the bunker, open its properties, go to Display and change the "Skin" for the colormodifier.
Not an optimal way of solving it, but if you only need it for a few objects you can do it.

[[TW]DrGuppy]

You can actually use a light with the LightEffect set to LE_Negative to darken the object as well. First though, make sure Display > AmbientGlow is set to 0 (I wish you could set this to negative values, it would save people so much trouble ). As Murphy mentioned, you could also try setting Display > ScaleGlow to 0. This can work fine, but may make your object look 'flat' because it will not be receiving any lights. If this happens bump ScaleGlow up to 0.5 or something and see how that looks. If you're trying to use a light with LE_Negative and find that the light is casting black spots onto your terrain and not just darkening the bunker, you might want to set Lighting > bSpecialLit to True for both the light and the bunker.

In short, try combinations of the following.

Light > Light Effect > LE_Negative
Display > AmbientGlow
Display > ScaleGlow
Lighting > bSpecialLit

It's a pain, I know, but until you move up to the next version of the Unreal Engine you're stuck with these methods. Just be glad you usually only have to do this for a few select objects.

[Xendance]

Also, try not to use zonelighting's ambienBrightness too much. It makes smeshes brighter than BSP and terrain so they'll stand out too much.

[Foo'bar]

Thanks guys for your answers, I will try all your recommendations. But still I'm too noobish and until I really know what to do I have to go the conventiol way - and for a skinner that means: hey, simply change the skin
And that's what I've made so far. Thanks anyway!