terrain lighting disaster

matthewjvia

I posted this on my thread in the pimping section too, but I figure it might be better to put this here as well.

I'm having serious issues with lighting this terrain. Since my terrain is very flat it had to be large, so it takes forever to build with low quality settings. Production quality is impossible and even on medium quality I have to set the lightmap resolution on the landscape to 16 or higher in order to get any shadows from the plants. That means that I end up running out of memory before the map can build.

This is the best result I have been able to get and in order to get that I had to have a friend build the level on his computer:


Does anyone have a good workaround for this because I would hate to think I put in all of that work to have it wasted because I can't build the lighting. Ideally, I would like to get the plants to cast dynamic shadows on the terrain, so I could lower the lightmap resolution, but I can't figure out how to do that. I would really appreciate some help. Thanks.

JamesWild

Make the sun a dominant directional light. Won't help with build time much directly, but as the shadows are created in realtime (appears to blend between two lightmaps) you can drop the lightmap resolution considerably and retain those nice shadows.

That is, of course, if you're not already using one.

matthewjvia

It's already a dominant directional light. The problem is that I can't figure out how to get it to cast dynamic shadows for the plants rather than static. If you know a way to force it I would love to hear it because this is driving me insane.

Blubberblase

enable cascaded shadow maps in you light by giving the radius a value of 1024 or higher and you should have dynamic shadows

HAWK12HT

what size lightmass importance volume is?

I am no expert but i have notice major speed difference when setting lightmass importance volume to specific size power of 2 vs random size. My logic says that when power of 2 size its easy to process that info faster.

and I dont know why u opt for Terran when Landscape is much better and have good features, and the whole point of it being lighter than terran.

set ur light dominant direction radius to 3500 and min max valuse below it to 4 4 or 3 4.

and do go around 100s of pages over here on polycount and Epic forums about lights and level design. (im not pulling ur leg) This is how i learned, the hard way. Its worth it.

Kenturrac

if you use a landscape and just call it "terrain", then set the landscapes static lighting resolution to 8.