UDK Dynamic Lighting Distance

riot

Ok, UDK's lighting is killing me.
I am forced to use dynamic lighting because if I bake lighting the 'moss'(green thing on the right) on the ground dissapears(I think it has something to do with specularity..), and the ground texture looks really bad without it, well, it looks bad either way but witout the specularity it really looks awful. I tried to force dynamic ligting, change the cascaded shadow map resolution, in the world properties I modified almost everything that cointains the word shadow but nothing worked . I also tried to bake lighting only on those meshes with bake selected only, but it didn't changed anything. I just want to render the dynamic shadows further away from the camera. I think it can be done trough some ini, but I have no idea which.. I don't know, I just want the shadows to show up on the distance like they show close to the camera. I don't care about performance, because this environment is just for 2 screenshots, so it doesn't really matters. Here are some screenshots to explain this better: normal position of the camera, it looks bad. However, if I get closer to the meshes, the shadows are ok

Ace-Angel

Does it do the same when you 'play' the scene? Remember, the viewport quality is degraded largely because it's not an environment that an artist will want to be locked in, so you need to test you scene from UDK-Game itself to get the highest quality possible in terms of visual feedback.

Specularity usually gets a separate bake, there are some documentations about it on UDN, so read those, but generally, complex materials that have Fresnel and such to fake 'moss' through the material (EI: very dependent on lighting and camera angles) are going to take a massive hit when you bake them out.

As for the shadow, it's simply a limitation thing, there is nothing you can really do about it. You can change some of the INI settings here and there, but they won't really make a difference in the viewport and it will only slow it down.

blankslatejoe

That looks like it could be the falloff of the dominant light's WholeSceneDynamicShadowRadius maybe?

You can push that radius out a bit...but I believe it comes at a tremendous performance cost. It's under the cascaded shadowmaps section of the actual sunlight's properties.

riot

Ace-Angel: Thanks for the info. I can't check if it's okay in-game, since this is my first environment, and my first time using UDK, so I made a lot of mistakes when I started it, like using wrong paths for the maps, for the package, etc. I also have some bookmarks on the editor (which are going to be the screenshots) and I have no idea if I can acces them in game. Thanks for the info on specularity, it helped me to understand some of the problems I'm having.

blankslatejoe: I've tried to do that, I changed it first to 1000 and then to 10000, I've also changed the other two parameters, but nothing changed, so I guess it has something to do with the viewport quality, as Ace-Angel said.
Well, I'll try to find an INI that is related to the viewport in some way, but if I have no luck I guess I'll make a Material Instance only for those meshes and I'll darken them up, or I will cover them with foliage.
Thanks for the replies!

Ark

Tried increasing the numbers of cascades? Although it's gonna come at a performance cost since that how cascaded shadow maps work. There always gonna look worse from a distance since it's using a lower shadow map size.

riot

Ark: Yes, and I still get those ugly stripes, however I found a workaround for this, I selected the meshes that were having that issue and desactivated in the properties 'Accepts Dynamic Dominant Light Shadows', and in the Lighting channles I left activated only 'Static', that way, it looks ok and I still got my moss on the ground. So, the issue is solved, thanks for you replies

sprunghunt

Ok I think you should just fix the material that is breaking the baked lighting.

At a guess It sounds like you've got a problem with vertex color and the reflection vector.

Here's a thread that might help

http://www.polycount.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-97159.html

And maybe post up the shader network that's causing the problem?