UDK Lighting Help
polycounter lvl 11
Thank you in advance for any help you can give me.
I am trying to create this scene
As you can see it is lit very strongly through the window with lots of beautiful bounce lighting going on.
I thought UDK's lightmass could get me similar results, but so far iv'e struggled getting anything nice at all.
Here is what I have so far. (Ignore the weird normal map errors for now, I'll have to figure that out later)
I have a single dominant directional light but it just doesn't seem to have enough light bouncing around. some of the settings iv'e tried playing with on the light are here:
Brightness
Indirect Lighting Scale
Iv'e also adjusted these global settings to try to get a better result:
Indirect illumination occlusion fraction
Num Indirect Lighting Bounces
Static Lighting Level Scale
I saw somewhere maybe using the lightmass replace node in the material editor, but i'm not sure how to use it.
I also have a custom lighting model on my materials. It's a basic phong setup but it modifies the saturation of shadowed areas.
If there is anyway I can get better results from the material, light, or global settings please let me know.
I know I can throw some more lights in there, but I want to know if there is a way to get a good result with just bounce light.
Thanks again for any help.
I am trying to create this scene
As you can see it is lit very strongly through the window with lots of beautiful bounce lighting going on.
I thought UDK's lightmass could get me similar results, but so far iv'e struggled getting anything nice at all.
Here is what I have so far. (Ignore the weird normal map errors for now, I'll have to figure that out later)
I have a single dominant directional light but it just doesn't seem to have enough light bouncing around. some of the settings iv'e tried playing with on the light are here:
Brightness
Indirect Lighting Scale
Iv'e also adjusted these global settings to try to get a better result:
Indirect illumination occlusion fraction
Num Indirect Lighting Bounces
Static Lighting Level Scale
I saw somewhere maybe using the lightmass replace node in the material editor, but i'm not sure how to use it.
I also have a custom lighting model on my materials. It's a basic phong setup but it modifies the saturation of shadowed areas.
If there is anyway I can get better results from the material, light, or global settings please let me know.
I know I can throw some more lights in there, but I want to know if there is a way to get a good result with just bounce light.
Thanks again for any help.
Replies
You can also try upping the number of diffuse bounces in your world properties and see if that helps.
Have you tried the diffuse boosts in the lightmass settings?
I managed to get that image above by creating flat square planes which emit light from their emmisive ( it's a setting for lightmass). You can make them invisible in-game so that you can still look outside.
I honestly don't recommend to use emissive materials as light sources. Lightmass do some random and ugly bugs with this (it's really random, sometimes you just need to recompile the lighting over and over again to skip them). It's better to use point/spot light.
You have a lot more controls with a point light by the way.
I turned off all emissive material light sources. all the lights. everything. and it still looks like that. I have no idea what the crap is going on and it is driving me insane.
the only way i can get rid of it is turn off GI. But that just make everything black since there are no lights on.
( if you REALLY have to have different scaling, then just change the 'level scale' in the lightmass setting. Default is 1, that is based on gears of war, so change the scale accordingly)
GL
Oh and btw, using emmisive lights should give you pretty much the same options as a point light, if you know each setting, it gets converted into multiple point lights anyway. But as ZacD said, perhaps its better to start simple.