foliage lightmaps?

JoshWilkinson

I've been working on a cornfield for a bit and am loathing the results I get when I bake the lighting. What I would like to see is the lighting light the corn stalks and create high and low lights throughout.



I can work with the lighting in preview mode but I know it isn't going to stay that way. The second image shows the lightmaps, which look equally poor in various lightmap sizes. Even by deleting the lightmaps and forcing vertex lighting, the results are less than desired.

JoshWilkinson

Update: It looks like if I manually place static meshes, I get desired results, but I lose lightmap functionality with the foliage painter. It's going to be a pain to replant everything manually but I'm happy to see that there's a solution.

Curiously though, the main stem (or trunk) of my corn stalk has disappeared if it's applied via static mesh but not if it's applied via foliage. Any clues? I've never sen this problem before

Hourences

YOu may have this problem: http://www.mapcore.org/topic/15556-udk-foliage-lighting-woes/

It is quite bugged, unless that has been fixed in the latest UDK. Last time I tried it was still broken.

128 is not a good idea for foliage, as it needs to get all lightmaps from each foliage cluster (default 100 instances per cluster) in one single lightmap. If each instance has a too high lightmap the thing will give up.

You could use cascaded shadow maps and dynamic lighting from a dom dir light, to work around the problem (then it renders it with dynamic lighting up close).

Manually replanting would be really bad for drawcalls. If you will use staticmeshes, at least create bigger sets of corn plants in a single model (20 corn plants in 1 mesh vs 1 plant in 1 mesh).

robert.briscoe

This has fortunately been fixed in the latest release of UDK!

System

vertex bake those mofos!

oh shit, posted before reading -___-