Toggleable pointlight with Lightmass

[AL_]

Hi all! I have a little question:

Can I generally have matinee animation of light's brightness, when Lightmass is enabled?
I tried it about ten times, but the toggleable pointlight saves its first brightness-value and animation does not work. But if I build my map without lightmass, my toggleable pointlight works very well.

How can I solve this problem?

[reinrag]

You can do that on script, you know you can loop states and hopefully the brightness will change i'm not sure how it how you could do it though, there is a tutorial from alan thorn http://www.youtube.com/user/alanthorngames he does a tutorial for animated lights notice that perhaps you might be able to tweak it a little and create what you want, hopefully it should work, of course you will not be able to do it exactly the way he did it as he is changing colors in your case you want to modify brightness, so you can create a state like his way and in this state modify the brightness and write your new brightness value something like that,

[AL_]

reinrag, thank you! I'll check it soon.

But I want to be sure: I CAN NOT USE MATINEE ANIMATION OF LIGHT'S BRIGHTNESS, WHEN LIGHTMASS IS ENABLED, eh? This case is not a bug, it's rather logical conclusion of statement, that Lightmass is about only with static lights, is it?

[darthviper107]

I've used it before, what type of light are you using? In the level I've done I have a bunch of lights on a spaceship and I can animate them blinking with matinee and it works just fine. As far as how the light works, it builds at full illumination and then I animate it to turn off.

[AL_]

Excuse me for description of my problem, I have some news about it:
I CAN USE MATINEE ANIMATION OF LIGHT'S BRIGHTNESS, WHEN LIGHTMASS IS ENABLED. BUT!!!
...but if first initial value of light's brightness is NOT zero.

In my level I have pointlight with zero-brightness, and when I touch trigger - this brightness must increase to 10. This animation does not work with enabled lightmass and does work with disabled.
Accidentally, I changed initial brightness value of pointlight to 1, and my animation began to work!!! With enabled Lightmass!

I don't know is it a bug or something else, but now I try to find a way to make initial light dark. For example, if initial brightness equals 0.1 or 0.01 or even 0.001 - all works correctly. But if it is less than 0.001 - it does not work =(

How can I spawn my light with good brightness, for example, equals 1 and then instantly change it to 0?

[AL_]

Eeeehhhaa!=) I found a solution for my problem:
I should check "Force Dynamic Light" on in LightComponent properties, and then all works good (Brightness changes from 0 to 10)

But I still have a question: How can I change some properties of my light via Kismet instantly?

[darthviper107]

Don't force it to dynamic, just set it to your initial brightness and then animate it down

[AL_]

darthviper107, "setting light to initial brightness (zero) and following animating" don't work with Lightmass properly. I said about it above.

[AlfredTs]

In theory why it does not work with initial value of zero is that there is no information in Lightmass about how the light should affect the environment because it thinks the light is off! With dynamic lights though you're gonna have all the shadows calculated in real-time which is not a good idea if it mostly affects static geometry. So as darthviper107 you better set it to some higher then zero value before you calculate lightmass and then just set the value to 0 in the first frame of Matinee.

For example I need to do a a quick day-night transition on iPad, so Force Dynamic light won't be a great solution in a situation like this. Calculating dynamic shadows for the whole environment is a hard job.