Lightmass and Its Infinite Headaches
polycounter lvl 9
Once again, Lightmass steps up to the plate as the most infuriating feature of UDK. I can never seem to make heads or tails of it. It's like the 3 yr old who can't make up his mind whether to be complacent or to start throwing tantrums.
This week's issue seems to be something to do with AO. And more specifically, AO with point lights, as I wasn't having this issue with emissive lighting. Before I continue further, is there a way to use emissive lighting on a material emitting low light and have bright blooms on it at the same time? If so, that would eliminate the current headache.
Right, so on to the problem. As I mentioned above, I needed to get a material with a bright bloom, but with a lower light output than what the bloom would produce. So I disabled the emissive light flag on the static mesh, and placed a point light in its place with the same intensity and falloff. This worked exactly how I wanted it to. Fiddled with a custom post-process chain to get the bloom tight and full.
I go to rebuild lighting in the environment, and.. what's this?
Oh hey, blocky shadows! Awesome. Totally not what I wanted, Lightmass. You didn't do that for my emissive lights, why did you decide to do it now? Oh, I get it. Must be my lightmap texel density, right?
Nope. Definitely dense. There should be no issue of shadow resolution there. Also, it only seems to be happening on static meshes. The ceiling, floor, and wall on the right side of that image are BSP. The solid white walls directly in front is a static mesh. Both BSP and SM have the same (or comparable) texel density. Way to go, Lightmass.
So the shadow pixelation is the gist of my problem. I'm not entirely sure it is exclusively AO either. The problem persists when I turn off AO, just not as blatantly. The texture on the walls is a solid white constant, with a tiled detail normal map.
I couldn't find anything regarding this, but is there some option I'm missing that deals with shadow resolution for point lights?
This week's issue seems to be something to do with AO. And more specifically, AO with point lights, as I wasn't having this issue with emissive lighting. Before I continue further, is there a way to use emissive lighting on a material emitting low light and have bright blooms on it at the same time? If so, that would eliminate the current headache.
Right, so on to the problem. As I mentioned above, I needed to get a material with a bright bloom, but with a lower light output than what the bloom would produce. So I disabled the emissive light flag on the static mesh, and placed a point light in its place with the same intensity and falloff. This worked exactly how I wanted it to. Fiddled with a custom post-process chain to get the bloom tight and full.
I go to rebuild lighting in the environment, and.. what's this?
Oh hey, blocky shadows! Awesome. Totally not what I wanted, Lightmass. You didn't do that for my emissive lights, why did you decide to do it now? Oh, I get it. Must be my lightmap texel density, right?
Nope. Definitely dense. There should be no issue of shadow resolution there. Also, it only seems to be happening on static meshes. The ceiling, floor, and wall on the right side of that image are BSP. The solid white walls directly in front is a static mesh. Both BSP and SM have the same (or comparable) texel density. Way to go, Lightmass.
So the shadow pixelation is the gist of my problem. I'm not entirely sure it is exclusively AO either. The problem persists when I turn off AO, just not as blatantly. The texture on the walls is a solid white constant, with a tiled detail normal map.
I couldn't find anything regarding this, but is there some option I'm missing that deals with shadow resolution for point lights?
Replies
Go to Engine\Config\ folder, open BaseLightmass.ini
and change
bAllowLightmapCompression=True
to
bAllowLightmapCompression=False
bAllowLightmapCompression=True
and set that to false.
Edit: Doh, beat by mere seconds.