Lighting - coronas

[Raylen]

Sorry to get back on topic, but thanks for answering the original post everyone. I probably should have looked in more depth on Unreal Wiki or other places before asking (moment of noobness, forgive me) here - but thanks anyway!

Right, carry on

[SzGergo]

I planned to tamper with my skybox anyway: i will try to make those nasty seams disappear at the edges of the sky textures (see what happens when i render them only to 510*510 and extend to the correct 512 by duplicating the pixel-rows and columns at the edges)

Guess you're talking about Terragen or something? In that case, render in 512*512, place the six textures in your skybox normally, and then scale them up by a value of 1.01. Then move each texture by one unit to the directions (U and V) where a boarder is still visible.
That should do the trick.

This is how it is done at the moment, but at some occasions edges may be still visible. At least not the other side of the texture, wich is extremely ugly, but a subtle seam. I guess it is becouse the pixels at the edges of the skytextures are clipped. So i am planning to make redundant rows there, and after the clipping everything should work fine. At least, thats my theory, but today evening i will try that out in practice, and report here whetehr it is working well or not.

[SzGergo]

Hahh! DoubleKill!

@Rev, I put your actors into my map and after adjusting the skins and glows and sizes, the sun looks fantastic, just like in my dreams before.
Also i have some more questions about it: What do you consider better, performancewise: using a single big SkyMarker, or using more smaller ones. Lets say i have a ~1000uu wide ledge at an open cliff at the ocean. If i want players to see the sun from the whole ledge, the radius of the SkyMarker must cover the whole area, no matter where i place it/them, since it is a totaly open scene. Which is better: putting a single cilinder, or, creating a cloud of those markers that more or less covers the exact view from that ledge?

(((Oh, and my skybox textureing worked too. So once if i find that thread where sy asked for making the cube seamless, i will write down the steps there. Just to do something useful too )))

[Revelation]

Use a bunch of SkyMarkers with small Radii next to each other instead of a single big one.

What I figured out is that the loss of performance seems to depend on the volume covered by all SkyMarkers together.
Let's say you have 1000 UU width and 1000 UU height you need to cover. Now if you use one SkyMarker with 500 UU CollisionRadius, its collision cylinder will have a volume of PI*(500²)*1000 = 785 million UU³.
If you use 10 SkyMarkers with Radii of 60 UU (not just 50, because they should overlap a bit) instead, your entire collision volume is 10*PI*(60²)*1000 = 113 million UU³. Quite a difference.
Now you could use even more, even smaller ones, but I guess that wouldn't improve the performance too much any more.

Ok, the whole thing isn't entirely true, as the effect on performance seems not to be linear. However, the tendency is correct.


By the way, there's another benefit of using many small SkyMarkers: The actor blocks projectiles (it must, otherwise the tracing collision wouldn't work), so a big one would kill all shots pretty close to the playable area of the map, which looks silly. Many small ones can be placed further away, or even inside a CloudZone, in the case you use one.

[SzGergo]

Thanks again for that warning, i have not noticed the porjectile-destroying, since i did not put anything into the map that would shoot projectiles.
I will modify the SkyMarkes that way then, and i also put some of them that are too close to the arena itself.