UE3 Light casting sharp shadows
I'm having a problem with UE. I imported a static mesh I've been working on and lit it in unreal 3 and I'm getting this problem right off the bat.
Could it be that the other sides of the wall are deleted? In order to save poly count I deleted the faces that you'd never see in side this level anyway.
could it be that? otherwise. I'm open to any solutions
Could it be that the other sides of the wall are deleted? In order to save poly count I deleted the faces that you'd never see in side this level anyway.
could it be that? otherwise. I'm open to any solutions
Replies
Are you sure you rebaked all?
What is your lightmap settings?
Are you sure you brought it in as a Static Mesh and not interpActor or something crazy?
Make sure the lights aren't dynamic or some weird funky light settup?
Does it look like this when you actually run through it in the game, or just the editor? (Sometimes you get weird issues like this when you zoom in and out in Editor, but not necessarily actually in-game)
Did you resize or rescale the object tremendously after dropping it in the level?
How does your wireframe / smoothing groups in your modeling package look? Any inverted faces?
Do any other meshes have this happening to them, or just this one?
Yes sir
What is your lightmap settings?
Light maps are fine. If you can imagine rotating to the right the dynamic shadow will move with it.
Are you sure you brought it in as a Static Mesh and not interpActor or something crazy?
Reimporting it as static mesh. Same problem. It's not just that archway. If I move into the room the black sharp shadows will follow through to the next corner
Make sure the lights aren't dynamic or some weird funky light settup?
starting from scratch. new light. It does that. I find that when I scale down the light radius small enough to go into the room they will go away but I lose all dynamic shadows. Heres a screencap of the light.
Does it look like this when you actually run through it in the game, or just the editor? (Sometimes you get weird issues like this when you zoom in and out in Editor, but not necessarily actually in-game)
When I build all. Run through I lose a lot of these nice dynamic shadows. Which the image following will show. I usually remedy this with turning on "bForceDynamic Light" and these sharp shadows will bake onto the mesh. So they stay.
here is the ingame shot after building all but this time including "bForce Dynamic Light"
Did you resize or rescale the object tremendously after dropping it in the level?
I did rescale the object twice since importing it. Lighting it at its original scale gives the same results.
How does your wireframe / smoothing groups in your modeling package look? Any inverted faces?
Rechecking the wireframe in maya. It's clean. The face normals for all face inside. I did notice that there were some holes in the level because the arch is misplaced a little and some of the cracks between it and the wall are exposed but I don't know if that could be the reason. I'll look into that.
Do any other meshes have this happening to them, or just this one?
It isnt just this mesh. it bleeds over into the wall. but it is localized ot this section of the level
I hope this was as detailed as possible.
The odd thing is that it only seems to happen to some people, while others have no problem.
EDIT: I see you posted while I was writing. Have you tried creating a new map and testing it? I've had that work before. Or maybe try your map in the actual game, not from the editor.
ShadowVolumeLightRadiusThreshold - Lights with radius below threshold
will not cast shadow volumes
ShadowVolumePrimitiveScreenSpacePercentageThreshold - Primitives with
screen space percentage below threshold will not cast shadow volumes
1: Your graphic drivers are not up to date. Sad but true this will generally fix 99.9% of all graphical issue.
2:You don't or at least from your screen shot it does not look like you have any of your light map resolutions turned on. So when you bake none of your mesh are going to retain their shadow/light maps.
3: Although not an issue I personally never set lights to "bForceDynamic". It has been my experience that this will only cause you more issues that will lead to you going bald early on in life.
4: In this version of unreal, 3.0, dynamic shadows just plane suck and there is no getting around that. In unreal 3.5(Gears II build) this is fixed and works much better but unfortunately Gear II is not going to be out for PC and there currently is not a game out that has an editor that uses unreal 3.5.
5: Make sure that the light radius is not to big. Remember that anything that falls with in the blue sphere of the light will receive lighting information form that light. If you really want this to be dynamic you could also put it on its own lighting channel and then have a directional light that only casts on that channel and no other ones.
Don't feel to bad that you cant get this to work I have literally spent days with the engineering department to try and get this fixed so that the shadows don't pop as bad but we never could come up with a solid fix that did not give us a massive performance hit(we are working on an MMO) or look like butt.
ShadowVolumeLightRadiusThreshold - Lights with radius below threshold
will not cast shadow volumes
ShadowVolumePrimitiveScreenSpacePercentageThreshol d - Primitives with
screen space percentage below threshold will not cast shadow volumes
I have tried messing with these variables before but I never got them to work the way that I wanted. I could have been doing it wrong but I am pretty sure that I was not but I could be wrong. I would try messing around with this and post back if it did work.
but anyhoo, that could very well be a graphics card problem.
but the dynamic shadows are only for preview purposes anyway all lighting is supposed to be baked to vert-colors and light-maps in unreal engine 3 .... i know i know thats not next gen and i agree.
if you want to use dynamic lighting /shadowing in your scene go with another engine that is actually nextgen. like cryengine 2 or something
If thats not your issue then I'd be tempted to go with what everyone else has said, though not out of experience
In stead of one whole mesh now they are seperately imported. afterward it worked perfectly.
I didn't know gears 2 was done with 3.5 UnrealED. News to me! So, i'm over this hurdle till the next!
Thank you for all the solutions. Billyclint I copy and pasted your post into my notes definitely helpful. Warby, imslightlybored, kovac, 00zero, junkieXL, Docm30, and ott thank you!
Just an FYI Unreal's shadow buffer can only handle like 20,000 verts or so for one object. If you have any more than that you will run into shadows not displaying correctly like you did. So to fix this you just have to cut up your mesh in to smaller pieces like you did.