projectors how do they work?

[Cursed_Soul]

ive been making my own meshes and all, and i finnaly have the time to open the ued (3), ive read in hourences tutorial that the best way 2 light up a lightsource is the usage of a projector, but how the hell do you set these things so they work propperly??

the size of the lighttexture on the mesh is 128/64 dunno if you need to know this but every little part can help.

[unfallzeuge]

a little more information and a screenshot would be nice...

projector-settings are quite easy if you know what you want, but there are so many of variables, so please give us general overview for the purpose of your projectors.

check out this link for the explanation of the properties: http://udn.epicgames.com/pub/Content/ProjectiveTutorial/

[Cursed_Soul]

piccy, dont know what info i should give you :s..
thnxfor the site ill take a look

[Bonehed316]

i don tknow the tut you looked at, but "lighting" does not require projectors.

there are special cases that do require projectors. water reflections on walls, stained glass reflections, some other sharp shadows. for isntance, the shadows in antalus on the ground that move. the same for tokara forest. these are all projectors.

what they do, is "project" a texture, which lights or shades in the shape of the texture. these textures are "modulated." meaning they have usually have alpha channels, and that alpha channel defines how bright or dark the projection is. alpha bits above 127 are brighter, and bits below 127 are darker. bits at 127 are neutral.

[Cursed_Soul]

dude, that i do know, im talking about this:
http://www.planetunreal.com/phalanx/tut's/tutorial_vertex.htm

original from hourences
Also good use of projectors can do a lot ofcourse. Also you can use projectors well, when you want to lit up an area around a lamp. Like in UT you would place a high brightness low radius light right next to the lamp, and it would nicely lit up. Problem in UT2 is that a mesh doesn't lit up as well, it stays pretty vague dark. In a situation like this you could use a projector to brighten the area up, you make a gray texture with a big white dot in the middle that fades out, and then you project that on the mesh. And make sure the projector only projects on meshes, and not the BSP, the BSP is lit up enough already by itself.
That way it will be a lot brighter, and will look like the lamp really gives off bright light if done correctly.

[X]

What you want to do is a bit of handwork. The reason he says to use a projector on your lightsource (if it's a static mesh) is because static meshes don't take lighting aswell as bsp. So his workaround is to use a projector that's projecting a bright spot on the light so that the mesh is brightened.

Doing that is a lot of hand work, you just gotta work with the drawscale value and the FOV value.

There is another workaround for this, you make a shader with a selfillumination map and mask on your light textures/skin.

[unfallzeuge]

nice solution X. i totally agree to that because projector-handling is much more complicated than texturing your meshes.

@ cused sould: take a look at some of the wall decorations they use on those spaceship-maps. the use their textures for shadows on the mesh itself as well... with a superb result (if you know how to render-to-texture inside your 3d-app)

[TaoPaiPai]

nice solution X. i totally agree to that because projector-handling is much more complicated than texturing your meshes.


And I think it takes more ressources from the computer too.

[Cursed_Soul]

nice solution X. i totally agree to that because projector-handling is much more complicated than texturing your meshes.

@ cused sould: take a look at some of the wall decorations they use on those spaceship-maps. the use their textures for shadows on the mesh itself as well... with a superb result (if you know how to render-to-texture inside your 3d-app)

I know how to render 2 texture!!!
but it still looks like ghey crap.


ive read a lot of tutorials and dong everything by the book,
but it still doesnt look nice.
and you people only talk about walls atm, a lot of light-meshes need a costum light.

[Dr. Nick]

Hmm you could reduce the load on your computer by setting bLevelStatic to true which turns it into a decal. Also this will remove the nasty effect of someone walking in between the projector and the surface.

[Cursed_Soul]

could u explain that a little bit big better please :S

[X]

could u explain that a little bit big better please :S

What he's talking about is a continuation of projectors, if you enable bLevelStatic, instead of the projector projecting the texture on the surface all the time, it will "glue" the projection onto the surface, it's the same as using a projector except for two things.

1) It Kills the projector on level start so it doesn't use anymore reasources.

2) if something where to go between the projector and the surface it's projecting on, it will no longer project onto that obstructing object (unlike a normal projecter) .

I think it would be easiest to just post your problem mesh/ map and have us look at it.

[Cursed_Soul]

atm im working on new meshes, when im done ill show u a few