A static Mesh casting a shadow onto a BSP brush

Jet_Pilot

I'm trying to get Unreal to cast a shadow onto the ground which is a BSP brush. any ideas what i'm not doing or have you had this problem before? a screen shot to help. and YES its is sitting just 1 inch above the ground.

JDinges

This could be many things.

The top of the list being:
Check the object properties to make sure it casts shadows.
Check the light's properties to make sure they cast shadows.

Do shadows show up when you bake lighting?

Jonathan

For a static mesh, you'll need to build the lighting, and if you want the resolution increased in the shadow, select the floor surface, and turn it from 64 or 32 to perhaps 16, 8, 4, etc.

If it's an interp/rigid body, you'll need to check this checkbox (to bring up this window, select the object and press F4 to see the "Actor Properties". There are several different options, but just to get it lit in the editor, check this option.

Jet_Pilot

Thanks but I still couldn't get it to work. I think i need a book or something to help figure it out. I got some shadowing from one of the lights but its very minimal and its not very sharp at all.

look...

JDinges

Probably not, but - The lights could be canceling out each other's shadowing, depending on their intensities and falloffs. Try turning shadows off on the back lights and keep shadows on the main light.

And depending on the size of that bsp block you may need to up that lightmap res.

gamedev

"And depending on the size of that bsp block you may need to up that lightmap res."

^ thats a good point - and as a side note, if I'm not mistaken, that value ranges from 1- (1024 maybe?), but for some reason 1 is better in quality.

hellobuddy

well, its reversed, the number represents number of centimeters per pixel on the lightmaps. So if set to 1 each pixel will represent one centimeter. If set to 16, every 16 centimeters will share one pixel.

Since its BSP and a BSP surface can be anything from a square centimeter to a square mile, you dont set absolute densities as that would create an awfull lot of extra work trying to get the resolutions concisent.