This is my setup right now. Still tweaking some things, but it’s mainly the same as Nate’s
Oh! 
I thought both the textures are same. So what texture is used for the T_Lightmap_02? I was using the below texture
My _01 is
R: Right
G: Left
B: Top
A: Alpha
My _02 is
R: Bottom
G: Back
B: Front
A: Emissive
If the image isn’t expanding, you can right click on it and open in a new tab and that should show it at full resolution.
The texture compression I’m using adds an alpha channel (and its included cost) by default, so I opted to add in a separate emissive map that I can color and erode out separately from the alpha channel that is handling opacity. The smoke cloud I’m using is the same for texture 1 and 2, just lit from different directions (hence the name, 6-way light map). I used Embergen for this texture, before they added the 6-way lighting feature, but even now I still manually render out each individual light pass, and then I adjust the levels in photoshop and then combine the textures into their respective channels. I also do this individually, because the Embergen 6-way textures have light direction textures in different channels than the setup I copied from Nate. So keep that in mind when looking at my setup. I may have different direction textures in different channels than you do.
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This is my “Front” texture in the blue channel of my Texture_01. Your front is basically like your base for your particle; it’s pretty much what you would normally use for a standard unlit particle cloud. Think of your other directional maps as highlights that are added on top of this texture, since the color for this is entirely emissive, so they shouldn’t have much value on the other side of where your lights are hitting. Hence why mine are basically black on either side, which makes the color of my packed textures look so vibrant and saturated. My “Back” lighting texture is basically a soft ring edge of the smoke texture with mostly solid black in the middle, since anything back lit would just get a soft rim light from it.
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i did some tests with that as well and i’m not sure if it’s the best way but here is my setup. hope it helps. I’m using two textures for my test:
T1.R Right
T1.G Left
T1.B Top
T1.A Alpha
T2.R Front
T2.G Back
T2.B Bottom
T2.B Not used (later maybe emissive?)
Blueprint sends the light direction into a material param collection:
Material chooses the correct channel
p.s. I think it’s necessary to convert to Tangent Space like shown here: https://twitter.com/Vuthric/status/1286804964287721473/photo/1
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Simon are you using the same texture for both there? I get nothing if I use both as the same, and …something… if I use the 6point light texture on the top, and a regular albedo texture on the bottom, but it isn’t affected by the lighting (which I’d expect given that all 3 vectors are involved).
no, it’s TWO textures.
T1.R Right
T1.G Left
T1.B Top
T1.A AlphaT2.R Front
T2.G Back
T2.B Bottom
T2.B Not used (later maybe emissive?)
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Yep, apologies, I realized this after reading more carefully. For some reason I’m still getting just a black square (the flipbooks were rendered from Embergen). On the plus side I’ve begun to actually understand what’s going on in the material setup (I tried both yours and Nates), but something isn’t right. Seems to be so many ways to make it work!
So it’s not rendering at all? Hmmm
@Travis It renders as black on the quad. I was able to get -something- to appear using your setup actually, with the flipbook node in the material, so that was part of it. Though it keeps the black around the actual sim instead of making it translucent (material is set to translucent/unlit). And light still doesn’t seem to affect it. Still figuring it out.
@Travis Could you post your entire material setup if possible? I’ve tried everyone’s setups so far and all I get is a black render… very, very annoying. I know I’m missing something simple.
Can do! I’ll try and get that up and on here in a few hours
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So testing it out, I need to double check my inputs because I have some stuff backwards, but it still renders. The AtmosphericLightVector node works off of Directional lights in the scene, so if you don’t have any directional lights, it probably won’t work.
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Thanks much Travis, very appreciated! I’ll give this a go later today and see how it turns out. I assume that MF you have there is custom? I haven’t seen that in the libraries natively.
Ah, yes it is, but it’s just what’s set up in Nate Lane’s “6-way light map WIP” thread. I just condensed it into a MF for organizational purposes.
It’s just everything in the image below. I need to double check to make sure I have everything plugged in right, but the internal contents are the same.
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Ah I thought so, smart thinking!
I know it’s an old thread, but there is actually a 6-way (well, 4-way) ‘Spherical Harmonics’ Directional Light-based Smoke Light-Solution inside Unreal out-of-the-box since Volumetric Cloud, I’ve found it in this Material:
/Volumetrics/Tools/SubUVMaker/Materials/M_Preview_SubUV_SH
There is also a Baker that’s bakes any UE Volumetrics into a texture Sheet in the “FluidSimulation_3d” Map called “BP_SubUVMaker”. It produces nearly anything you’d need (color, opacity, temperature, normal, velocity, Spherical Harmonics), the material above is part of that BP.
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Hey guys, I’m trying to make this material in UE5, but the nodes Atmospheric Light Color and Atmospheric Light Vector doesn’t exists anymore. Does somebody knows their equivalent?
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Very nice post from Unity (2023) about 6 sided lightmaps
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