Lighting Channels not working?

dawson_john

I'm trying to use lighting channels to prevent certain lights from talking to certain static mesh actors. I thought the proper way to do this was to use Lighting channels, but I can't seem to get it to work properly.

The settings on the left are for the Mesh, the right for one for one of the two lights I'm trying to mess with.



Now, this image shows what the main room aught to look like. The two lights in question are shown, and are disabled.



But when I enable them, they are clearly talking with the main blockout geometry for the room the camera is in.




So what am I doing wrong? Why do these seem to be completely disregarding the lighting channels? Or perhaps I'm going about this the wrong way?

Hourences

Seems correct, unless I am also just looking over the issue.

Try to change light color to something very obvious, like pink, just to make sure it is not another light/bouncing that does this.

You may want to keep Composite Dynamic enabled because that is what characters and other dynamic meshes use.

Rebuild of course, you did that I think. Rebuild geometry also to be safe.

sprunghunt

some suggestions:

1) if you want to be able to disable the lights and re-enable them try using toggleable class lights. EG: pointlighttoggleable

2) if you're turning off lights during gameplay always have them ON as the default state. You can use a kismet action that disables them when you load the level to turn them off when the user sees them first.

dawson_john

Hourences, I"ll definitely try reenabling composite dynamic. I did rebuild lighting, but I didn't rebuild geometry, so I'll try that too.

Sprughunt, I disabled the lights, just as a measure of having a base to compare off of once they were on. These lights will always be on in the level.

I will also mention that I'm using level streaming. The lights may in fact be in a different level than the geometry I'm trying to prevent them from talking to. Would this mess up the lighting channels?

sprunghunt

dawson_john wrote: »

Hourences, I"ll definitely try reenabling composite dynamic. I did rebuild lighting, but I didn't rebuild geometry, so I'll try that too.

Sprughunt, I disabled the lights, just as a measure of having a base to compare off of once they were on. These lights will always be on in the level.

I will also mention that I'm using level streaming. The lights may in fact be in a different level than the geometry I'm trying to prevent them from talking to. Would this mess up the lighting channels?

if they're in a different level you can set them to ignore other levels (rather than using lighting channels). It's a different kind of setting - but if that's what you're after it might work better.

dawson_john

Neither solution seemed to work. I cannot get the lighting channels to talk to each other properly. At this point, I've decided to bake each level individually since they're sufficiently seperate.

Should remove any issues I was having before. Thanks for the help, y'all!

leleuxart

Is it just me, or is the mesh on Unnamed 3 and the lights are on Unnamed 2?

dawson_john

Correct. It's a bad JPG, that's showing a light for mesh 1 and the mesh for mesh 2. Badly composed. I went back and checked though just to be sure, and I had them marked properly.

dawson_john

sprunghunt wrote: »

if they're in a different level you can set them to ignore other levels (rather than using lighting channels). It's a different kind of setting - but if that's what you're after it might work better.

Now that I've decided it's best to seperate lighting into each level... how WOULD I go about setting lights to ignore other levels? Because right now, I have each individual level lit okayish, but when streamed together, sometimes a light in one will blow out the lighting in another.

Hourences

I believe that setting has been removed a year or two ago. It used to be right click on those levels in the level browser - check self contained lighting.

These days it is just lighting channels.

dawson_john

ughh.. jeeze. Which I've experienced aren't working very well for me.

dawson_john

Well, looks like they ARE co-operating now. I can only assume I was borking something up somewhere along the lines. Go figure. Either way, it's working now. I appreciate all of the help, y'all!