ProcBuilding Lighting errors

praetus

So, I've been making some procBuilding rulesets for work so that we can how useful they are. I've been having some fun with them and just seeing what they can do, but when I bake lighting everything goes to hell.



The light bake is effecting every modular piece separately instead of the building as a whole and I can't figure out as to why. Instead I get stuck with something that looks like lego chunks and is very obvious even with materials applied.

I have checked my normals in Max and I'm using soft egdes with the normals facing out. In UDK I have added a second UV channel and UV unwrap in the static mesh editor for lightmapping. Has anyone else run into this problem or a possible fix that I am overlooking?

toxic_h2o

I had the same exact problem with a scene Ive been working on. Also looking for a solution.

sprunghunt

It's the same problem you'd have with any lightmapped tiling pieces. You've just got bleeding from one part of the unwrap to the other.

my suggestion is to snap your lightmap UVs to a 8x8 grid. Especially for edges of the object. And maybe bump up the resolution.

Also for large flat surfaces like the building in the middle you should use a quad rule. Instead of using lots of small tiling pieces.

praetus

Maybe I misunderstood this from UDK but since they're separate pieces being driven through a facade script, shouldn't the lightmap be different for every piece that's being reused? After all if I had two props in a scene the lightmaps would be different depending on the lighting in the surrounding areas, right? Is it that different for tiling objects in facade? The resolution is set to 256 right now on the individual pieces and on the BSP mesh i had it set to 1024 with no changes or results >.<

Also, I should have said before, in relation to the quad rule on the middle building, that was mainly me testing to see if the same objects tiled would it give the same lightmap error. Usually that building has the same facade script driving it as the other three buildings with porches, windows, etc.

Justin Meisse

UDK fills the area outside your lightmap UVs with black, it could be the issue where your uv borders sit along a "half pixel" allowing some of that black to bleed through

Sean VanGorder

Yeah, this issue is really frustrating. There's no real way to completely fix it, but you can minimize it.

Are you building with preview lighting? Building with Production lighting usually helps a lot.

praetus

The black bleeding through is an issue but the issue I'm trying to work on now is the giant difference in lighting between some of the pieces themselves. I circled a few examples to show which parts I am talking about. It seems really odd to me that I'll have a dark area and the BAM! super light block thrown in the middle.

sueds

do you get any error message when you bake the light ?

sprunghunt

praetus wrote: »

The black bleeding through is an issue but the issue I'm trying to work on now is the giant difference in lighting between some of the pieces themselves. I circled a few examples to show which parts I am talking about. It seems really odd to me that I'll have a dark area and the BAM! super light block thrown in the middle.

do you have an example of the same models stacked up on top of each other without the procbuilding?

because it really looks like you've just got bad lightmap UVs or not enough lightmap resolution

praetus

Weeeelp, I feel kind of foolish. While it took some time to render, I tried out the production settings for the lighting and it actually fixed a great deal of the problems. I even had a group of windows that were non procBuilding that looked bad before but now look great. Thanks for the help guys!