Hello all,
when using a more advanced light setup (with overlaping fixtures) the smaller ones are sometimes not visible at all, sometimes partly visible and sometimes it works to my surprise (see images).
Is there any clever fix to avoid this? I have tried for more than 8 hours with different materials, sizes, 2D and 3D, alignments, but nothing seems to end this mess.
I don’t see any problems the lights look fine to me!
The second photo on the left side is how they should look… which they dont in the first picture and in the second on the right side.
do they appear and disappear depending on the angle you are looking at them?
I had the same problem occur a few weeks backs on a build. Some componements disappeared depending on the angle.
Yes, but I fixed that in Automation - it is visible from all angles, also in photo mode. But its messed up in Beam.
I tried now to give a better impression of what is wrong.
By coincidence, my car spawned correct at first, so I made a screenshot.
Usually, the car spawns with indicators and/or reverse lights missing on one or both sides, like this:
I already tried tripling the fixtures, so that at least one would always spawn - does not work. If I remove the red material, it works, but well, this looks equally bad. Is there a way to solve this? Happens every time when using lights on top of another.
Unfortunately this sort of thing is a game engine limitation more than anything; multiple layers of transparent materials are extremely challenging to handle, and neither BeamNG’s game engine nor Automation’s Unreal Engine 4.27 can handle them adequately.
The easiest way you can fix this is to use cutouts to remove the red tail light material where you are going to place your indicator fixtures.
This is exactly my experience, however, I didn´t see removing the main taillight material as a good solution. The cutouts seem like a good idea, but won’t work with more complex shapes.
But since you can not do anything about it right now, it seems, what you stated is the answer for now. I will continue to try something, maybe there is a smart workaround, I will let you know when and if I found one.
The cutouts have proved to be useless. However, I was not willing to let go of this.
After more than 100 hours (according to the steam counter) I found the solution, and it is so damn simple that I could run against a wall for not having found it earlier.
@MrChips gave me the right idea to solve this, by admitting:
neither BeamNG’s game engine nor Automation’s Unreal Engine 4.27 can handle them adequately.
So, what did I do? All the lights that are layer 2, on top of the red material, stick out a bit. Since the hours of testing already showed me that if there is another material than taillights behind it, it would work, just as stated by MrChips. So I made sure that the layer 2 really sticks out a bit. Then I copied the fixture, changed it to the general car color, sized it to 0,9 in extent to make it hide behind the indicators and reverse lights… as you can see in the screenshot, it needs to stick out enough to be ABOVE the red layer 1 and BEHIND the yellow layer 2!
So now the game considers the last layer in front of the transparent material as the one below the indicators, and since this is now the body color, everything should work.
I tried it 5 times per vehicle and this is the result: IT WORKS!
Just to make it clear: The fixture copy of the second layer must EXACTLY fit between both layers AND must have NO TRANSPARENT MATERIAL.
It seemed to have worked flawless, I spawned all these three vehicles multiple times without serious errors.
