UDK Weird Lighting issues - help please

TorQue[MoD]

Hey all,

So I'm trying to put together a sample level for our game's pitch video and running into some weird lighting problems. Its hard to explain so I'll just show the video:
http://youtu.be/ry6RnuHFhLQ

Basically as you can see, the light seems to get darker and almost black depending on the angle of the camera. If I look up at the ceiling it goes all black. In one direction down the hallway, the light looks fine, turn 180 and all of a sudden its either really dark or really bright. I thought that this was an issue with specularity so I disabled all the spec maps in the materials and built all again but it didn't fix the issue.

Anyone know what's happening?

Thanks!

Quack!

Does this happen when that material ONLY has a diffuse material applied to it? Similar effects can happen when you have your spec power set way too low.

TorQue[MoD]

Yeah, I thought it was the specular at first too so I made all of the materials into simple diffuse only but that still didn't solve the problem. I ended up taking the entire building over to the November 2012 build and the lighting works fine there. I'm still going to play around a bit more cause in the 2012 build I didn't use any spot lights whereas I did use them in the feb build. I wish I could copy the exact lighting setup from the Feb build to the november one but that's not possible. It really doesn't make sense what's going wrong.

Interesting that you say the spec power being too low can cause this. I would have thought the opposite.

Quack!

Yea when spec power gets too low, below a value of ~10, it starts to behave in unexpected ways.

But that is odd, it seems it is that one mesh that is the issue. I am assuming you have tried re-exporting and re-importing that mesh?

radiancef0rge

I mean, it looks like some good eye adaptation lol

TorQue[MoD]

its not one mesh, its a modular building built from 30 meshes.
I exported the building model as a t3d file and then re-imported it back into my main scene. This time however I noticed that it also brought in a package with the same name as the t3D file - one that I deleted last time without looking at as I thought it was just a copy of the package containing the source models and materials which I already had. Turns out that this package contains a huge suite of lightmaps of my main scene. I tried to save the package and got the error that I can't save maps through the browser.

I'm guessing this package is a temp file that's supposed to be left alone until I re-build the lighting... once I built the lighting, the lightmap package saved itself and everything worked fine. So the problem was obviously that I deleted the lightmap package last time. Very strange that it created on to begin with and I have no idea where it was saved but it works so I'm not complaining. Thanks for the suggestions guys.