Orthographic light

[javier.serrano]

Hi, we have started a new project where we need to render +150000 lights at the same time. As this is imposible, we decided to bake lights in textures and then project them to terrain by using a light or a decal.

 

For rendering textures we used an orthographic camera (which give us perfect textures) but LightProj fov minimum value is 1 (and has projection errors) and decal is affected by light, so it can't be seen at night.

We need this textures to be rendered over terrain without global illumination (at night) but in orthographic projection as our render camera is.

 

Is there any way to project a texture with an orthographic light or any way to make decals being not affected by lighting? Any other tips?

 

Thanks in advance!

[silent]

Hi Javier,

 

Right now it's not possible to achieve that using the decals.

 

If I understand you correctly, you need to have special type of decal blending mode that will act like an emission texture to simulate lightning on the very far distances?

Is there any real-world pictures of what you are trying to achieve? Probably, we can implement such functionality it in the updates. 

 

If you also can send us your world with ortho decals and textures for them - it will surely speed up the development.

 

Thanks!

[javier.serrano]

Hi,

 

Yes, that kind of decal will be great. We are attempting to reach something like this:

 

 

Thanks for your quick response.

[javier.serrano]

Hi,

 

we are trying to make decal_base material have an extra "emission" pass for rendering a texture after light shading. But we can't make decal material to run custom shaders (by the way a simple one that outputs red fragments).

Is there any way to make decals have an extra emission pass with a custom shader? Maybe other tips to make decals unlighted?

 

Here is an example of what we have achieve by using planes:

 

 

The point is that terrain orography makes imposible to use "flat" planes. We want to replace this planes by decals as they fit terrain height.

 

This is a key point for our project. Can you give us suggestions for reaching this effect? 

 

Thanks a lot, Javier

[silent]

Javier,

 

I've spoken to the developers team, they will try to add the emission feature to the decals. Currently, you can't modify decals to add missing features - there changes required in the engine code itself (alongside the shader code as well).

 

Unfortunately, the feature list is already full for the 2.5 update, so this request will be moved to 2.5.1 or 2.6 release. If you will need this feature ASAP, please let us know - we will think what else we can suggest.

 

Thanks!

[javier.serrano]

Hi Silent,

 

These are good news, we will wait for the 2.5.1 / 2.6 release which adds this feature. If time becomes a problem for us, we will let you know.

 

Thanks a lot, Javier

[Greg.Mildenhall]

We would also like to use emissive/unlit decals. How's progress?

In the meantime, we're also looking at the feasibility of hooking up our own psudo-decal rendering pass as a post effect. (both as an approach to making unlit decals _and_ because we'd like to apply decals to transparencies which don't fill the depth buffer until after the main lighting is done) Does that seem likely to work?

[silent]

Hi Greg,

We didn't have time to implement this functionality yet into existing decals, so currently we don't have any suggestions. Not sure about alpha test materials as well since we don't have transparent terrain out of the box, so we will not consider such use case at this moment.

Thanks!

[javier.serrano]

Hi, with new 2.6 beta release we expected emissive decals being included but they seem to have not been implemented yet. Are they planned to be included in 2.6 version? If not, can you give us any solution to reach this effect with current tools? We really need this feature for showing our city lighting baked textures.

Regards, Javier

Edited October 16, 2017 by javier.serrano

[silent]

Hi Javier,

I'm afraid this feature is not yet implemented. As a workaround (and really dirty hack) you can just use plane (2 polygons) with grabbed lights texture with emission state. You just need to adjust it's position to match the terrain.

We will try to implement this feature later in 2.6.1.

Sorry for the inconvenience caused.