UDK - Pitch Black Shadows

Ace-Angel

Hey to,

I was wondering if anyone knew a way to avoid pitch black shadows in UDK?

Currently, in the editor I have Precomputed Lighting which works, but once I jump into "Play", it stops working.



Anyone have any ideas?

Ace-Angel

Tiny bump, I played around with every option available for lighting and such, but no avail. I'm using Dynamic lights, non baked by the way.

sprunghunt

Ace-Angel wrote: »

Tiny bump, I played around with every option available for lighting and such, but no avail. I'm using Dynamic lights, non baked by the way.

Bake the lighting and you will not have this problem. Using only dynamic lights is not really possible without major changes to the engine.

The ambient values for dynamic lighting comes from a network of baked in points that combine the environment world properties with nearby lights when you bake. You should also have a light mass importance volume.

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Lightmass.html#Character%20lighting

Info above

Ace-Angel

Cheers Sprung, I guess I have to bite the bullet

blankslatejoe

Well, you CAN use only dynamic lights, and not bake them, at a HUGE performance hit (mostly in shader complexity, I believe, but some in drawcalls for shadows, and who knows what's going on in under the hood ticks)...


There's an option under worldproperties>lightmass (I think) that says 'force non-precomputed lighting for this level?' or something like that. Then you'll have to add a skylight. Then you'll have to flip on dynamic shadows for things you want to cast shadows.

For a simple game-jam project, a demo, anything with simple or minimal art, you can totally get away with this. For anything remotely resembling triple-a, you probably don't want to go down this route.

Obscura

If you want to use real time lighting, try the skylight actor to brighten up that black shadows.

Ace-Angel

Yeah, I am just doing a simple project in privacy, nothing major and didn't want to do bother with Lightmapping since I'm on a single PC and the baking times would be insane.

Cheers for the Skylight, didn't know about that use for it