Level Design How to? block light

Have you done a build all or at least build lighting only? Generally light will hit everything within its light radius while working within the editor until the lighting has been compiled and told what blocks it. This is as simple as going to the Build tab at the top of the editor and selecting either Build Lighting Only or Build All.

These build features need to be used fairly often after specific changes to make the editor show you whats really going on. So if you ever run into something down the road where lighting or BSP are not doing what you want, try the "Builds".

Good luck.

As far as I know the ONLY thing that can block light (static light) is BSP.

I'm not sure what it is exactly you are trying to do, I've read your post a few times and I have no idea. Some pix might help.

have you tried using directional lights? check out KF-Waterworks and you'll see them being very well used with his yellow stairs.

That's the problem with dynamic lights (he said he's using a blinking light.) They pass through BSPs and SM and there's really no way to stop that from happening.

All you can really do is reduce the radius/brightness, and move the light further up away from the floor. But then the center of your light source can look disembodied.

You probably just need a smaller light radius. Lighting requires patience and lots of lights. I mean, for every light source on your map, you might need 2-4 light actors to create the desired illumination. Simply because, having one large light with a large radius (more than 20 is pretty big imo) will light up a larger area, cause bloom on BSP if any other light hits that surface. Especially a flickering light in my experience, seems to go through walls a lot. I made these flickering basement lights in KF-Dreamhouse that could be seen lighting up the floor of half the map. In the end I had to use about 20 small lights seperated by small distances in order to light up only the desired area.

Also, the brighter your light, the more radius it seems to cover. Sounds to me like your solution is:
a) reduce the radius of the light
b) duplicate the light and place the duplicate in a spot a short distance away from your first light (I'm guessing above the desk?).
c) repeat if neccessary

Spot light would probably work in your case but I think you need to understand how to use lighting better in general.

Depending on the situation you can also do stuff like have a single bright light source with small radius, then the same colour but not as bright with a big radius, to provide some light to the edges of the room but having the BSP closest to the light source been the brightest.

Typically what I do on my current map is pretty basic. I just have a corona on my light source (light bulb/chandalier), that seems to give off some light around the bulb. Then I have the same coloured light with a radius of 10 placed about 64 units or so from the corona. That's not a great deal of light but I have several sources like this in each room/hallway.

If this sounds like disjointed rant its because I'm trying to give some general lighting advice. The rest is experimentation. But the key thing to remember is that Unreal engine does not do realistic lighting including shadows from a single light actor. You have to fake this by using lots of small light actors.

Have a look at KF-Mountain_Pass. Theres a very good police car lighting setup, might help you with your settings.

NAKED GI JOE said:

Thank you all for your input and suggestions....I will try some of these. I would show some pic of what I want if I could get what I wanted.....but picture this......... one of the British police car in a dark ally with the blue light flashing.......you standing 40 feet away...the light would hit the buildings on either side of the ally and shine up the walls for a bit...the roof of the car would be lit up but inside the car would don't really have much "blue light" shown....the top of the buildings would also not be lit up assuming they were more than 3 stories tall.... this is the effect I want. I want my lite to go >< not all over.


But thank you for the input, I may also look into the shadow casting settings.

NAKED

Click to expand...

Put a corona or two for the sirens on the car roof. Then directly above them, half way between the car roof and the building rooftops, put a flashing trigger light, with big enough radius to hit all the desired walls. However, if those same buildings also have playing area on the inside of them, you may notice the light penetrating the walls to the inside. The only solution I know is to then use multiple lights with smaller radius instead.

If there is such a thing as shadow casting settings then I totally missed it, if its useful then someone enlighten me?

Dynamic lights don't cast shadows in this engine.
You can use projectors instead.