With UE5 Graphics, Why Am I Faking The Flashlight?

Flashlight Glow master material: drive.google.com/file/d/1Fkqj...
Paste it into the Content folder of your project to then find it in the Editor's browser.
There are two types of gradients to use, radial and UV-based linear. Linear is good for "light beam" cones, but it requires a straight UV map. Default cones in UE have that UV map. Radial is great for big flat glows from the front and back.
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Chapters:
00:00 - Welcome Back
07:10 - Flashlight
18:07 - Foliage Shake
23:12 - Landscape and PCG
27:23 - John Animation
31:31 - Anyway
Music: chillin' under the moonlight - Sarah, the Illstrumentalist.mp3

[@BoroCG]

So I goofed about the light falloff curve being cubic - it's actually quadratic, as @IngmarJ2rve pointed out. So if you use my shader for the glow, you can set the power of the gradient to 2 instead of 3 to have a closer to real gradient!

[@undead_prime]

Do you mean inverse square law?

[@SB-jx6ox]

It's starting to look like a real game. This is one of my absolute favorite "series" of videos to watch on KZbin. There's no one else really showing in detail their game dev journey like you are, at least that I'm aware of. Showing us how you're learning is helping me learn.

[@DrTheRich]

Light fades away quadratically, not cubically. You can think of this with the light cone. If you make the cone twice as large (meaning it shines on an object twice as far away) the bottom circle surface of that cone is now two square times as big, but this bigger surface still has the same total amount of light. Thus each individual point at that distance has the inverse square of two of light intensity left. So 2 is the correct falloff power for light.

[@BoroCG]

Oh thanks, you're totally right! I thought I knew this from a while ago, but I guess I was confused by some settings in Maya back in the day haha I wonder though, if we talk about the light in the foggy environment (since we're adding the foggy cone effect), do dense particles in the air make the falloff curve stronger? Or is it just a shorter radius, but the curve is still quadratic

[@DrTheRich]

@@BoroCG The light particles would produce minuscule shadows, and would reflect that light back at the sender. So yes the falloff would be shorter but not because of the same reason. It would be an additional linear effect on top of the quadratic one, so you could add a linear factor to the formula i guess. Think of car lights in a thick fog, you actually see less with a brighter light, because the light gets reflected back at you.

[@tempname8263]

​@@BoroCG Yes, falloff would be stronger. In fact, as light travel through any medium, it constantly loses some percentage of it's power (it either gets absorbed by medium, or gets scattered all around, in some directions stronger than in others, which also blurs the light, all of which we can for our purposes ignore). That means that brightness reduces exponentially. So you just multiply your inverse-square-distance with exponent of a negative distance X optical density, and you should be good. Alan Zucconi has a small series on creating an atmospheric shader grounded in real physics, which you could use to understand how it all works indepth

[@edward3190]

making a game look great is often different from making it realistic. Game designers would try out many different fade such as sin wave, exponential, cubic, etc, or two blend together (exponential nearby, quadratic far away), then choose whichever looks best/most cinematic.

[@DrTheRich]

@@edward3190 Obvious overused statement that has nothing to do with my comment. I was simply correcting a mistake he made in the video.

[@leethememerwolf]

Fantastic graphics! You're doing bloody great Boro.

[@IngmarJ2rve]

Awsome! Are you planning to add enviromental effects like wind? Falling leaves, bugs, birds? Would give alot of life to the map. Or gives an opportunity to give some ambient transition between areas. Like in the beginning the forest is lively and active, birds, bugs and such but getting closer to these areas with monsters the birds could get silent. The bugs would swarm some areas and such. Would be a nice way to reinforce some creepyness.

[@BoroCG]

Actually the wind is something I decided to remove, since the whole place is like frozen in time when John is trapped in it. There are moving foggy zones, I'm also thinking to add some changing cloud compositions for different areas, and there will be some specific sound design and sudden sounds in the woods. Another type of effect is levitating debris and such, but it'll probably start after John enters through the Gate

[@pigskinofficial1888]

@@BoroCGit would be cool to add frozen water particles from wain in some zones, frozen wildlife, etc. you could make some cool scenes and little stories within the world and a whole lot of personality while still keeping that frozen time stuff you said. It could also be a cool encounter with an enemy because the player would be so used to everything being still, it would catch them off guard to see an enemy move at them from within the forest

[@janimusicshorts7707]

its been awhile for me but your games looks so much better. hope that's encouraging. love you videos.

[@MarxFerreira]

Amazing progress so far!

[@Its_SKL]

im brand spanking new to UE5 and i cant even make a landscape i like yet, this looks amazing! cant wait to get to your level of skills.

[@efs3]

Love these devlogs! It's great seeing your progress towards an AAA level game 👀!

[@delphicdescant]

I kind of feel like having these weird things traveling through the woods, or just standing there doing nothing, is almost creepier than having them chase you. You expect a monster to chase you.

[@_Sickk]

No, your opinion sucks.

[@wilted_kale]

Guts and headhunter lookin pretty sweet. you seem like you're havin fun - that's good to see

[@neilosullivangreene3299]

For the head hunter, You could create a skeleton for it with several bones on its bottom 'tail', then you could add the kawaii physics plugin that simulates physics on that tail, but the plugin gives you more control on how you'd like it to move would could make it look more ethereal

[@zapalniczkakaminski9990]

I love seeing all the people getting into game dev lately!

[@BoroCG]

Game dev is getting into people lately

[@ArefaAnanya]

The introooo so gooddd lesgooo

[@user-ku1lq4ol2y]

looks so cool man!

[@juhor.7594]

Hmm. Headhunter's front view looks a bit phallic in the dark. Not that that's necessarily a problem with the kind of horror you're going for.

[@BoroCG]

Only a plus

[@GriffinTwo]

John looks like the little kid from the pennywise novel with the yellow jacket

[@cnnhean]

Wow, subscribed !!

[@ObviouslyPoptart]

give every monster human names

[@literallyjeff]

Have you tried using the material domain "Volume" for local fog shapes? It might be more flexible than using multiple meshes with fresnel & depth fade, and it would blend with the rest of the volumetric fog and lighting properly. I'm unsure if it would have a similar ghosting issue, but my thought is that might just be an issue when using actual light source contribution. Ben Cloward has a video Local Fog Volumes if you need a demo.

[@vladdimitrov819]

Awesome attention to detail with everything! Love the progress! Were you still thinking of sharing the flashlight material? Id love to see how thats built and repurpose it for some flood lights in a level! Thanks!

[@BoroCG]

Oh yeah, will do in a minute! Thanks for the reminder

[@BoroCG]

drive.google.com/file/d/1FkqjOlYL5titUaCTkgR7Hjoai0KhL0SZ/view

[@vladdimitrov819]

@@BoroCG amazing, thank you so much!

[@Neurde]

You should check out motion matching! If you have a wide range of animations motion matching will help them all seamlessly work together.

[@Moonguy13]

Lets goooo new video This made 1 April better 🎉🎉

[@BoroCG]

Yaaay! Haven't prepared anything funny for the April fools', but I am a joke myself, so

[@TUKMAK]

Damn! Its really coming along nicely. Going for the polish kinda locks you in to making the game im not worried about that part

[@DennyLindberg]

Regarding the material shake thing with a limited number of influencers. Could you potentially use a low res render target that follows the player and have the nearby enemies render their influence into it? That way the overhead is from rendering their influence into the target and your material lookup cost would be constant. I guess you could even make the render target a velocity field to determine the direction of the shake. I bet there is a Niagara guru out there who would do some crazy shit based on that, maybe fluid ninja could be abused.

[@smortonmedia]

this flashlight breakdown is the best, I love that you're using this method instead of doing actual volumetrics because it looks incredible. Goes to show true artistry and creativity can yield better results than simply relying on the latest cutting edge tech

[@Astaraa]

What UE version was the file made? I tried 5.3.1 source and 5.3.2 and it doesn't appear in the content browser for either. If you share it as a snippet in the UE community that wouldn't be great + no compatibility issues.

[@keyblademaster8263]

You don't have to rig/animate head-hunter you can use noise like you did with the grass & leaves to distort him to make him wiggle.

[@timcarrot]

that hoodie is sick, does anyone know where it's from?

[@TiagoTiagoT]

Still gotta work on making the toothy tree fit with the realistic style of the rest of the scenario. Right now it still kinda looks like a fiberglass decoration in a kiddy playground in a fastfood place....

[@BoroCG]

Sure thing! It actually need to have some blend shapes prepared to open and close the mouth, too, which implies retopology and all that. I'll be working on each of the 5-6 locations I have in this Gate puzzle area from now on, as well as animations for them, and concept art

[@arttest0156]

are you using Lumen GI?

[@Vigilence]

It would be scarier if the light was low and yellowish like those cheap double d flashlights, and if the monsters had the ability to block most of the light, only showing an outline and shadowed features.

[@delphicdescant]

I agree on the cheap yellowish flashlight. My only concern is how many people these days probably wouldn't remember what a non-LED flashlight even looked like, if they'd ever even seen one. Do they still sell them?

[@Vigilence]

@@delphicdescant dollar stores sell them, any place that sells discount items like Walmart etc.

[@Ben-rz9cf]

I haven't seen the video but im going to take a stab in the dark and guess its the caustics.

[@BoroCG]

What no

[@JayFolipurba]

He doesn't look like he's running, he looks like he's steping briskly forward with determination xD Maybe a simple fix would be to adjust the fow when sprinting, to make the movement appear faster. The same way a racing game without fov manip or motion blur looks slow

[@BoroCG]

Will see, first I need to apply proper running animation at all, maybe that's what it needs

[@daliborgarza5244]

Your creature looks similar to Maneba from fear and hunger.

[@rhctb]

i thought you said fleshlight at first lol

[@mzsutodraw]

I recommend you MOTORICA AI to polish your move motion

[@cirusMEDIA]

Plzzz fix that Walk/Run cycle next!!!

[@BoroCG]

Okay!

[@DrSoda.]

Very impressive. God bless. Jesus loves you!

[@DadJokeCinema]

Why do we do anything, honestly

[@BoroCG]

A good problem to have

[@UncleGanesh]

please do overpains again!

[@andrewsneacker1256]

Why dont just use ALSv4 community version? Its has far far faaaar better animations and its free.

[@BoroCG]

Well, as I mentioned many times, I haven't even started adding animations - what John is mostly using right now are placeholder animations from like 2 years ago. And I want my own animations, same as I want my character's appearance. I think it's very important, and interesting to do

[@TAWY510]

@@BoroCG ALS is an incredible free tool, but you're right not to use it - because so many cheap, cash-grab titles flock to it as a one-size-fits-all solution, it has a certain "code smell" to it. No disrespect to the creator, but that's the nature of things being available to anyone for free. Based on your lighting implementation here, I think you'll do a great job with your own solution.

[@TooMich]

Who gonna tell him that he may not want to be pronouncing flashlight like that?

[@mcdonalds420]

If it goes of in random moments even for little 🤏👌