Fixed daytime lighting and basic ambience for the DemoMap:
- Sun pitch -50 / yaw 120 (intensity 4, warm), sky light 2.6 with real-time
capture, sky atmosphere, height fog, and an unbound post-process volume with
fixed exposure (min = max brightness) so no shot washes out or crushes to
black depending on how much sky it frames.
- Root cause of the washed-out look was NOT the sun: Blender's flat diffuse
colours do not survive the FBX->Unreal import. Every site material arrived
white and the terrain arrived with WorldGridMaterial. The demo builder now
creates and assigns M_Asphalt / M_Concrete / M_Ground / M_RoadPaint.
- Crossing fix: each zebra band was its own object, so Blender renamed the
duplicates .001/.002 and site assembly (exact-name append) kept only one.
All bands are now a single Crossing_Markings mesh (36 verts, 3 bands).
- Terrain gets a Ground_Earth material in the builder so it stops importing
as a white grid.
- Demo cameras: street-level no longer sits inside the facade body (was
rendering its back face), and the crossing camera aims at the designated
s=130.1 crossing (UE X -14956) looking along the crosswalk.
Screenshots re-rendered; the four demo views are marked needs-review for the
owner's approval. MEMORY.md records the material-import, exposure,
light_color, band-naming and camera-bounds traps.
Root cause of the empty review frames: EditorLevelLibrary.load_level/new_level
are deprecated no-ops in -nullrhi commandlets, so staged actors landed in the
current world and got saved over the wrong map. Switched both map builders to
the LevelEditorSubsystem and reordered the review builder to save ReviewMap
before the DemoMap section (the switch-back to a map that only exists in
memory silently failed, writing demo content over ReviewMap).
Rebuilt both maps, re-rendered every screenshot; user visual check passed.
Screenshots/README.md cube naming corrected (A grounded, B floating), approval
states updated; TODO.md visual-review notes closed. MEMORY.md records the
deprecated-call and save-order traps.
- street_mesh.py: continental zebra markings (0.5 m bars, 0.5 m gaps, 3 m
band) at all three signalised crossings, triangles not quads (FBX SDK
refuses to triangulate the crown-twisted quads), stripes +6 cm above the
DEM so they stay above the road surface; winding flipped so every street
surface faces up (road/sidewalks/markings were 100% down-facing and
invisible in engine once the terrain stopped covering them).
- terrain_from_dem.py: cut a 10.7 m corridor around the Hollywood Blvd
centreline so road, kerbs and sidewalks are not buried under the terrain;
sidewalks themselves cover the transition band, walk-check stays at 0 holes.
- Blender builders save with a writability guard + fatal failure: *.blend
is LFS-lockable and checks out read-only; a failed save previously left
downstream steps building from stale files.
- ue_import_site.py: Crossing_Markings imports with no collision (paint on
the road); ue_build_demo_map.py stages it and chmods the lockable .umap
before saving (save_map silently returned False on read-only maps).
- ue_build_review_map.py: demo-crossing camera moved to the real crossing
(s=130.1 m -> UE -24291,-1340) and fixed the ensure_writable path (was
missing the .umap suffix, so the chmod never fired).
Tools/ue_build_demo_map.py builds /Game/Hollywood/DemoMap: sun, sky, the hero
facade on the building line, six site meshes imported with collision, and a
player start on the north sidewalk. Tools/ue_import_site.py imports the site
FBXs; terrain, road and sidewalks use complex-as-simple so a simple hull cannot
ramp over the kerbs. Art/blender/site/export_site_fbx.py exports one FBX per
object so each can carry its own collision.
Reset (R) and pause (Escape) join the character and the input context: reset
restores the spawn transform and clears momentum, pause is a real game pause that
releases the cursor. DefaultInput.ini captures the mouse on launch.
Three placement defects found by measuring the imported actors rather than
trusting the plan: the spawn was on the wrong sidewalk because the FBX flip
inverts north, a mirror I added to the exporter double-corrected an already
correct sidewalk, and the street meshes only carry part of the north walk - the
rest is terrain.
zwitschi