UDK lighting stopped working all of a sudden

Ack Master

Hey, I've been working on a scene for the last while. Everything was working fine, didnt add any new meshes.. All i did was brightening up my scene as it was nearly done. All of a sudden renders started taking forever to finish then stopped all together. The lighting got to 99.31 or 99.61% done and sits there.

I try taking the peices and moving them to a new scene but same problem. Either production or preview it just takes forever. if i go back to the default scene with the cube it bakes fine. I have NOOOOOOOOOOO idea why its doing this and rather not lose 4 months worth of work.

mostly LEARNING udk more then lighting and making stuff.

James Ordner

Lightmass, from my experience, bakes the smallest lightmaps first, and moves up in size as it goes and takes on the biggest lightmaps last. It also doesn't update the progress bar until it finishes baking a map. So what I'm guessing is that you have an object or two with a huge lightmap res, and it's taking a long time to bake that particular asset(s). Try looking for any assets that have a huge lightmap res and lower it, or run lightmass overnight.

Ack Master

well i went through and changed everything from what it was set at to 64 or smaller and it made no difference sadly.

I tried deleting all the meshes also one type by one type and even baking on preview and still never worked. I dont know if its a material or something else thats causing this all of a sudden issue. This morning worked great, then just stopped.

Ill let it run over night and see if that does anything.

Hourences

Running 64 bit editor I take?

Equally stupid question, but there is enough drive space on both C: + drive UDK is on?

There is a SwarmCache folder in Binaries, try to get rid of it.

That folder has log files also + LM window has log tab. Check the log and see if any clue.

I've had this a few times, it stops at one point near the end. It doesn't mean your work is lost, you just need to find the piece that is causing it. If you can't figure it out, go through step by step. Delete all the biggest meshes/landscape/brushes -> save as -> rebuild -> does it work? If yes, one of the deleted things was it, revert, and go through it again. If no, continue deleting things.

Try to delete all your lights and then rebuild. If it still goes wrong it aren't your lights. Equally delete all meshes but keep all lights, then rebuild. Step by step, try various combinations. Try to narrow it down to what is doing it.

Use the stat windows to get an overview on all lightmap sizes of all meshes, try to see if nothing is off or overly huge/high poly/stands out for any reason.

There is a LightmapSize in the world properties. Try to lower it from 1024 to 512. This can sometimes help the baking, especially on PCs low on memory.

Do not use emissive to cast lighting on any meshes, that feature is a lot heavier and more likely to fail.

r4ptur3

check to see if there are any pieces with terrible UV overlapping. Lightmass is pretty forgiving when it comes to UV overlaps, but I can see it getting stuck in a repetitive cycle trying to compute many sets of overlapping UVs.