Lights

Esselle

Hi all, this is my first post in polycount forum! I'm a newbie in udk and in 3d/2d art, so I have a bit of questions...

Is lightmass useful? I think light points are the best to have a better atmosphere of the scene... maybe lightmass is used to enlighten big maps such as cities' exteriors?

How instancing meshes exactly works? If I have 400 meshes instanced with 400 tris, i have a scene with 400 tris, or 400*400tris? (I think the first but i'm not sure :O)

How much AO influence final render?

Thanks for the help!

passerby

you should use lightmass, it pre-calculates lighting and bakes it into lightmaps.

400*400tris, instancing, isn't reducing the tris on screen, what instancing is doing is saving you memory. since with 400 instances of the same mesh, the mesh olny needs to be loaded into memory once not 400 times.

Amount of AO depends on the look your trying to achive and are you talking about the full scene AO as a post processing effect? or are you talking about AO that you baked into your texture maps?

Esselle

passerby wrote: »

you should use lightmass, it pre-calculates lighting and bakes it into lightmaps.

So the shadowing and lighitning in real time is quicker?

passerby wrote: »

400*400tris, instancing, isn't reducing the tris on screen, what instancing is doing is saving you memory. since with 400 instances of the same mesh, the mesh olny needs to be loaded into memory once not 400 times.

Great! Thanks

passerby wrote: »

Amount of AO depends on the look your trying to achive and are you talking about the full scene AO as a post processing effect? or are you talking about AO that you baked into your texture maps?

I'm talking about the baked AO

Now I noticed another problem...


Why the shadows suck and were cutted? Is it because of low poly count?

McGreed

Looks more like you don't have a proper lightmap in channel 1 (normally 0 is your texture, and 1 is lightmap/ao). You can try going into the model in UDK, and quickly generate another uvmap.

Santewi

Esselle wrote: »

So the shadowing and lighitning in real time is quicker?

Yes and no. While using real time lighting you don't need to bake the shadowmaps and therefore you save memory, but you won't get bounce lighting and the performance is much worse.

Esselle

McGreed wrote: »

Looks more like you don't have a proper lightmap in channel 1 (normally 0 is your texture, and 1 is lightmap/ao). You can try going into the model in UDK, and quickly generate another uvmap.

Work fine! Thanks

Santewi wrote:

Yes and no. While using real time lighting you don't need to bake the shadowmaps and therefore you save memory, but you won't get bounce lighting and the performance is much worse.

Umh, understood. I think i will use lightmass.

But if i want flashing and moving lights, i cannot use lightmass, right?

Santewi

Esselle wrote: »

But if i want flashing and moving lights, i cannot use lightmass, right?

Dynamic lights can't use lightmass. For the main lighting in your scene (like the sun) you should use lightmass, but then use dynamic lighting in places where you need it.

Esselle

Santewi wrote: »

Dynamic lights can't use lightmass. For the main lighting in your scene (like the sun) you should use lightmass, but then use dynamic lighting in places where you need it.

Ok perfect. Thanks very much to all!

osman

And you CAN actually have static( lightmapped) lights that you can toggle or make it flash using a lightfunction or whatever else you want. Just create a moveable light or a toggle.